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

bleepingcomputer.com

441–450 of 763 posts

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

#441
post #374

- ~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…

I think ChatGPT’s moat is mostly “it’s the first AI thing I used/heard about”. It’s not clear to me that’s enough to maintain their market share if OpenAI is the only one mixing in ads. It does seem to work elsewhere, though; consumers have brand loyalty to a fault, and often for the brand they started with.

That’s basically Google’s search moat too.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100% with you. In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT. Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola. Did people switc…

I think it’s more reasonable to consider Coca Cola as having a significant brand value moat, given that they’re 140 years old and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. That also gets at the other side of their moat: distribution. Coca Cola is available basically everywhere, and a challenger would have to invest massively to simply get in front of as many people on shelves. In that way, other companies (Go…

Who cares if it took 140 or 3 years to get brand recognition. ChatGPT is also everywhere if you have an Internet connection.

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Meta are many thousands of sales people, managers, engineers, SREs, HR, masseuses etc. If you want to scale to Meta or Goog scale when doing ads you won't be able to do it with a few dozen people. Just sales will be hundreds or thousands spread across all the major territories

what's with all the naysaying? It's HN in 2025 and you think a company the size of OpenAI can't afford to build ads?

Except OpenAI’s value is overinflated by an economic bubble. They don’t have the manpower or resources to effectively implement an ad network on the scale they’d need to become profitable. Why are you insisting we keep the conversation positive?

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

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do. IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to in…

I can't wait for the instructions to start having ads embedded. 2. Place the turkey in your GE Two in One Oven set to 350, cooking for 10 minutes a lbs. 3. While waiting for your Turkey to finish cooking, why not have an ice cold Coke Zero? Click here for nearby locations. 4. Remove Turkey from the oven, let rest for ten minutes while listening to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sing "Die with a Smile" on Spotify.

It was in Black Mirror

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

#445
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, among others, would have zero issues in ensuring that OpenAI does not grab a market they own; it shouldn't be that hard to bring OpenAI into a position where they cannot recoup their investments, hence going bankrupt. The big players then would also have the benefit of having those very bright minds being on the market for them to gr…

Microsoft is financially backstopping OpenAI - they are not a competitor.

Microsoft is using them in order to be better positioned than other big players, and they succeeded, even if Google is now starting to catch up. They can withdraw their support when and how they see fit, own exclusive IP rights to OpenAI's models and the hardware is their own anyway. They only lack the researchers, but they'll then be on the market.

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

#446
post #146

ChatGPT will already help you items to buy. Google does this as well, but thanks to BrainFartNoMore you to can create content that will help you make millions. I wonder if the ads will drive away users or not. And once ChatGPT does it, then all the others will follow. The free era of AI is over.

*subsidized era

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

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait for the instructions to start having ads embedded. 2. Place the turkey in your GE Two in One Oven set to 350, cooking for 10 minutes a lbs. 3. While waiting for your Turkey to finish cooking, why not have an ice cold Coke Zero? Click here for nearby locations. 4. Remove Turkey from the oven, let rest for ten minutes while listening to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sing "Die with a Smile" on Spotify.

You’ll wish it was that and not “a word from our sponsor NordVPN” or scammy crypto investments

It'll be hilarious (in a tragic way) if Google adds ads to Gemini using their existing platform and suddenly it becomes a scammer in the middle of chats.

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

#448
post #358

It's too bad, because AI could be a new way of buying things. It will probably still be a new way of buying things- I hope an AI assisted shopping experience continues to exist on some platform, because I want to use it. I already use AI to make all kinds of buying decisions. If OpenAI were smart they would just monetize this instead of trying to corrupt the chat interface with ads. I actually am fairly bullish on th…

They sort of already have this (IIRC Perplexity also has it), there's a "shopping" specific mode which presumably adds affiliate links. But even GPT-5.1 hallucinates a bit too much to be trusted buying anything without me as a human-in-the-loop. I tried to have it help me find climbing shoes for my cuboid feet and it went from making up specifications to telling me to buy shoes that don't fit and cutting them up with tools which wouldn't work.

EDIT: Looks like they don't add affiliate links? I'm surprised, it seems like a natural thing to do outside of the incentive to bias purchasing sources.

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

#449
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that training a free and open source model costs just as much as training a closed one, but has even fewer potential avenues for recouping that investment. The money still has to come from somewhere. I'm not sure if open weights are immune to being compromised by ads anyway, they can't serve pay-per-impression ads on the output side, but there's nothing stopping the creator from accepting funding in ex…

I would laugh my ass off if Coca Cola Company ends up being the company that solves alignment - so that it can align an "open weight" AI with its corporate interests. Without that though? Our ability to manipulate LLMs is so shaky I would be really surprised if anyone managed to pull off this kind of model manipulation and have it remain undetected.

I almost believed that they just did, they aren't without their share of quirky and unusual projects and sponsorships.

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

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's with all the naysaying? It's HN in 2025 and you think a company the size of OpenAI can't afford to build ads?

Except OpenAI’s value is overinflated by an economic bubble. They don’t have the manpower or resources to effectively implement an ad network on the scale they’d need to become profitable. Why are you insisting we keep the conversation positive?

see you in 5 years
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