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OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

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Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#161

Post by DustinKlent »

Degrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company due to the ubiquity of LLMs. LLMs aren't something special that no one else can create and use. Google is a poor example because it had a monopoly on search for a long time due to its foothold and technology, but OpenAI has nothing like that at all. OpenAI has no moat or "secret sauce" that would enable it to be more successful than any other LLM company.

If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do (and more), then what motivation do I have to use ChatGPT? The only motivation people would have is ease of use but if one service becomes bogged down and compromised then people will just shift to one of the other hundred equally effective services with less ads. LLMs aren't hard to spin up and put out there for people to use.

Honestly, I don't think OpenAI is going to survive very long unless they get incredibly lucky or they come out with some banger of a new model or new app but even then, IDK...

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#162

Post by garbawarb »

mikepurvis wrote: post #115

FWIW, I've gone to ChatGPT multiple times with a specific intent to buy, like "hey I need a thing like X or Y, but with quality Z too" and sometimes it just hallucinates things that appear never to have existed, other times it comes up with real items, but the links it gives me to buy them lead nowhere, so I end up just googling the name of it and buying it that way (examples: computer monitor, power bar, USB charge…

Same. I've found Meta's latest model to be the best at product discovery. Which makes sense since that's already their business.

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#163

Post by jonfw »

DustinKlent wrote: post #161

Degrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company due to the ubiquity of LLMs. LLMs aren't something special that no one else can create and use. Google is a poor example because it had a monopoly on search for a long time due to its foothold and technology, but OpenAI has nothing like that at all.…

> If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do

And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle!

We are miles off from open models having parity with what the AI labs are putting out.

And that's putting aside the compute requirements to run the top open models and the poor economics of running these models locally.

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#164

Post by mikepurvis »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #158
mikepurvis wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of these cases I'm not looking for "the best" or a ranked list. Rather I'm looking for an item to fill a specific need and I can judge within a second of seeing the picture if it does or does not. I expect some or all of the items I've been shown did exist for sale at some point in the past and information about them was in the training data.

You prefer outdated-by-atleast-a-year data instead of the freshly scraped and ranked Google Search results? GPT 5 was publicly released in August last year. That data has to be atleast a year old, right? If I'm comparing Macbook Neo to a Chromebook, it's impossible for the Neo to show up in the training data, and has to use RAG (This is assuming the data is atleast a year old. Seems like OAI isn't doing fresh runs fo…

Not everything good or necessary was released in the past two years.

As an example interaction, recently I sent ChatGPT a picture of my soldering station and say I'm having trouble with it being slow to melt and it says "well these are your upgrade options but really all you need is a chunkier tip with more thermal mass, he's a link to a tip set you could try" but then the link is dead and I'm able to google my own similar set and just buy it (it worked great).

Another one was wanting a U-shaped bracket to mount a riser on my desk, and the only ones I could find at the building supply store are L-shaped. I asked Chat about this and it said it's just too niche of an item to be mass produced but suggested I buy from someone doing semi-custom fabrication on etsy. Sure enough... another dead link, but I google it and find the store, and order.

Two cases where I didn't really know what I actually wanted/needed, and Chat successfully filled the gap with information I was able to independently verify afterward, but also Chat missed out on the opportunity to get a referral fee out of my eventual spend.

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#165

Post by unfunco »

fsckboy wrote: post #82
crowcroft wrote: post #8

The most surprising thing to me is that they're partnering with third parties to do this. Less secure, lower margins (more middlemen taking fees), harder to access, more likely to not work properly. I would expect all the meta execs they've hired to know better so maybe I'm missing something...

> lower margins (more middlemen taking fees) middlemen taking fees is not the measure for comparison, the question is whether you could run your own ad business for your own platform and keep your costs lower than established players who sell on all platforms. the answer is generally "no" look how much money coca cola makes, and they sell it cheaper than water and still pay for advertising!! we should all make our ow…

You're paying way too much for water.

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#166

Post by dd82 »

eswdd wrote: post #76
dd82 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how much trust are you going to have with your model results that they haven't been transformed and adjusted by advertising priorities? search engine results do this all the time, reordering output by advertiser input. its a pretty small jump from that to rewriting output from models, and even better where its all a black box.

Also Google did it over-time - they didn't suddenly become who they are today 10 years ago even.

oh absolutely, its been a progression though and search order rewriting was implemented very early on as part of ad integration. its common in search relevancy/tuning circles

your example with google isn't necessarily applicable now because they've shown a roadmap that can be done and squeezed down tightly between the "hey, we're good folks" to "you're our captive cattle, we can do whatever the fuck we want. there's nothing you can do, since all our competitors will be doing the exact same thing shortly"

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#167

Post by rglullis »

jonfw wrote: post #163
DustinKlent wrote: post #161

Degrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company due to the ubiquity of LLMs. LLMs aren't something special that no one else can create and use. Google is a poor example because it had a monopoly on search for a long time due to its foothold and technology, but OpenAI has nothing like that at all.…

> If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle! We are miles off from open models having parity with what the AI labs are putting out. And that's putting aside the compute requirements to run the top open models and the poor economics of running these models locally.

It's not "miles off", the gaps are narrowing instead of widening and they are already more than enough for the majority of use cases.

Getting people to install a different chatgpt app on their phones is a lot easier than getting them to change their search engine.

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#168

Post by solaire_oa »

jonfw wrote: post #163
DustinKlent wrote: post #161

Degrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company due to the ubiquity of LLMs. LLMs aren't something special that no one else can create and use. Google is a poor example because it had a monopoly on search for a long time due to its foothold and technology, but OpenAI has nothing like that at all.…

> If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle! We are miles off from open models having parity with what the AI labs are putting out. And that's putting aside the compute requirements to run the top open models and the poor economics of running these models locally.

Not all prompts require the same compute, and Gemma-4B runs on our phones with parity output for ordinary 1-5 sentence queries. The common use case of Google-style queries is already solved locally, saying we're miles off is ridiculous.

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#169

Post by 6thbit »

DustinKlent wrote: post #161

Degrading your product by filling it with ads or, God forbid, by making the LLM returns less accurate and influenced by advertisers, makes ZERO sense for any LLM company due to the ubiquity of LLMs. LLMs aren't something special that no one else can create and use. Google is a poor example because it had a monopoly on search for a long time due to its foothold and technology, but OpenAI has nothing like that at all.…

Google did just fine with the same strategy on search.

Re: OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

#170

Post by 6thbit »

crowcroft wrote: post #8

The most surprising thing to me is that they're partnering with third parties to do this. Less secure, lower margins (more middlemen taking fees), harder to access, more likely to not work properly. I would expect all the meta execs they've hired to know better so maybe I'm missing something...

I find it a good surprise. Signals they probably don't want to become an advertising company, which is what every other tech business ended up becoming. And that is not against having ads be a core revenue driver, like for companies in other sectors.
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