Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 763 posts

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#241

Post by ethmarks »

chroma205 wrote: post #192
auggierose wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of users having no idea what "export chat history" means?

> 99% of users having no idea what "export chat history" means? Yet Google Chrome managed to make Safari/Edge irrelevant.

Not having used anything except for Firefox, I don't have any experience with migrating to different browsers. However, my understanding is that Chrome shows a little pop-up that lets you import from previous browsers rather than relying on the user to do a data export. Correct me if I'm wrong about this.

I suspect that Claude couldn't make an "import from ChatGPT" button because OpenAI would make it difficult, so they'd have to rely on user initiative and technical capability (exporting to JSON and importing from JSON is enough technical friction that the average user won't bother).

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#242

Post by barbazoo »

victorbuilds wrote: post #238

Building an AI product for kids right now. Went with subscriptions specifically to avoid ads. Kids are especially vulnerable to advertising and parents are increasingly suspicious of ad-supported "free" products. Curious to see if OpenAI carves out any age-based protections.

Parents are also suspicious of AI targeted at kids.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#243

Post by dangus »

aurareturn wrote: post #14

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products - Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are) - An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative di…

You are 100% correct, and I don’t mean to refute your comment by saying this:

For me personally, the moment AI has ads, I’m out.

I’ve drawn this line with search engines as well. I now pay for a no-ads search engine.

But for AI, I think I’d rather buy some hardware or use my existing desktop PC and run something local with search engine integration.

I know this won’t be a popular option but I think this time around I’ll just skip the ensgittification phase and go straight to the inevitable self-hosting phase.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#245

Post by micromacrofoot »

aurareturn wrote: post #14

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products - Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are) - An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative di…

the moat is always ad networks in the end... open ai figured out a new way to accumulate users to show ads to

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#246

Post by lanthissa »

simianwords wrote: post #143

Few open questions - ads only on free version? - why the need for ads at all if llms can literally get you to the exact product? push vs pull marketing - will models be rlhf'd to align towards preferred products or would the advertisements run ads at the prompt level? (based on some dynamic opaque configuration) my predictions - yes - i assume they are trying both ends but need to justify free tier someway - i think…

ads always start on only the free version, then either the free version has a minor fee that slowly gets ratcheted up over time or the paid version gets ads and theres a higher no ad tier version added.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#247

Post by isodev »

glenstein wrote: post #164
isodev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? We managed to radicalise people into the rise and fall of entire countries through analog ads, can you imagine how devastating it would be to infuse every digital product with all that?

>Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? I mean I do. And you do. Probably a lot of people in this thread. I felt that way about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on. I think you're right that these ads will be, in a sense, worse, but not by the metrics that matter to OpenAI.

> about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on

I think the main challenge here is that Netflix works around one of many ways to access entertainment. So if one service starts to show recommendations in that limited context of user data they collect - it's still has negative potentials but it's easier to regulate and there are alternatives.

In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine. This means ending up in a situation where your entire access to knowledge and the world takes place via "AI". And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities. I've read and seen a lot of sci-fi and dystopian history novels (actually read, not LLM-summarized for me) to know this is a very end-game kind of situation.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#248

Post by caymanjim »

bigbinary wrote: post #221
lxgr wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude? I’d be extremely surprised. Gemini? As gemini.google.com or as the thoroughly mediocre “AI summaries” on top of Google Search results?

Claude has been aggressively advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, and the ads have been much more general use than just the code benefits. They’re definitely no ChatGPT, but they’re not an unknown player.

You're only seeing those ads because the ad algorithm knows you. My family aren't getting Claude ads. They wouldn't know the first thing about it even if it were explained to them.

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#249

Post by yesimahuman »

mrbombastic wrote: post #222
lxgr wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude? I’d be extremely surprised. Gemini? As gemini.google.com or as the thoroughly mediocre “AI summaries” on top of Google Search results?

Yeah my father who codes occasionally asked me what the best AI for coding was and he had never even heard of claude so I would be very surprised if your average person knows it.

They absolutely do not. It took getting out of tech a few years to realize how hilariously out of touch we can be in this industry

Re: Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

#250

Post by jmyeet »

So there are two broad models for ad monetization:

1. In-result or first-party ads; and

2. Display or third-party ads.

In Google terms, (1) is SERPS ads and (2) is DoubleClick/AdSense. (1) is still ~10x the size of (2) for Google.

I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of inserting ads into an AI chat mode. I think this will be a terrible user experience and will cause people to really dislike AI assistants. Part of the problem here is that conversation isn't a great medium for conveying ads. If you look at a Google search result, there are ads strategically placed on the top and side but they don't waste that much time because you can scan with your eyes to the organic search results.

So would OpenAI ads be part of the conversation or would there be a sidebar? If it's a sidebar, what happens when the interface inevitably switches to voice-first?

To be clear, I'm not anti-ads on Google search results. If I search for "Ryzen 9800X3D" a site selling CPUs is a relevant result, for example.

Intent here is the biggest part of ad effectiveness. By doing a search the user wants to know or get something. That's huge. But another part is all the context and behavioural information. Where you are, inferred demographics and interests, etc.

People will say OpenAI knows a lot about you but I'm not sure that's true. For a start, LLMs have a context window beyond which they remember nothing. I'm sure people are working on taking that context and summarizing it down into base knowledge for the LLM a bit like what happens with your Google activity. I would guess this approach has a long way to go.

So this brings us to display and having essentially an OpenAI pixel. This has the same issue of compressing your context down into characteristics but I actually think this could be pretty successful but it would still have to compete with Google. And that's not easy to do. Google has significant ad buying and selling infrastructure and a deep marketplace.

But remember too that display ads are a fraction of Google's other markets and I don't htink you get to the required revenue OpenAI needs on display alone.

Of course it's worth adding that with unlimited money and the brightest minds of our generation all we can come up with for monetization is advertising.

Post reply on HN