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

bleepingcomputer.com

451–460 of 763 posts

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

#451
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight fro…

Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate. > In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo" And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.

> Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.

No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults. OpenAI doesn't control the platform, which means they've already lost to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.

> And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.

Clearly you know nothing about the history of the console business, because Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005, despite Nintendo's brand strength.

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

#452
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?

People are being weird about this. ChatGPT has no moat because switching costs are zero. There's no investment into a particular AI service. ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat. The fact that people will continue to use ChatGPT after some gentle frog boiling is true of any service. Adding ads is going to be a measure of how real people tolerate ads more than anything about ChatGPT. Normal…

> ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat.

Short answer: For a casual user using the chat interface, there is almost no moat.

Long answer: there are either zero or negligible

- switching costs ("would take me weeks to migrate all my files from Google Drive to Dropbox")

- network effects ("can't leave Whatsapp, all my friends are there")

- ecosystem lock-in ("I can't switch from iPhone to Android, my other devices would break (iMessage/iCloud/AirPods))"

Right now AI is pretty much a commodity.

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

#453

Do we think this is not already happening, but on an "unconscious" level? I mean, if ChatGPT is trained on the internet, wouldn't it make sense that most recommended content would be sponsored ads. This is a serious question because I don't really have a full understanding of how the training is done.

Yes, but nobody’s paying for it, and nobody’s getting rich off that. Or at least they could be getting more rich.

Won’t someone think of the quarterly reports?

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

#454
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a short matter of time before agentic tools start serving ads too - paying user or not. You want to refactor your codebase ? No issue - taking 30 seconds - please view this ad meanwhile.

It’s worse than that. It will be more akin to ad placement in movies, except in this case it will slip this proprietary library into the suggested solution instead of that one. Or embed ads in the solution code.

Gemini kind of already does this. I use builder in AI studio and it tends to use Gemini in places where other solutions make more sense. Last week I needed users to input their address, validate it, and geo code it. Rather than using google maps APIs (way cheaper, free tier) it used Gemini to do it.

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

#455
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a short matter of time before agentic tools start serving ads too - paying user or not. You want to refactor your codebase ? No issue - taking 30 seconds - please view this ad meanwhile.

They don't need to make us view ads anymore...just say ,,Allow Vercel to use credit card stored by OpenAI''...click to continue refactoring

Stripe already built this out and it’s in ChatGPT. Some merchants let you buy directly in the chat interface, and payment credentials are shared through the chat interface to the store (securely, etc)

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

#456
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain to me what ChatGPT does that traps people? I get the value as tools, I like using copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't offer me value that any other LLM can't. Given that everyone is quickly rolling "AI" into their own stuff, I don't see what's ChatGPT's killer app. If anything, I think Gemini is better positioned to capture the general user market.

They make it a habit to use them, by offloading that part of their thinking/process to them. It’s similar to Google Maps, or even Google itself. When was the last time you went to an actual physical library, for instance? Or pulled out a paper map? Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors. That is what the race is about (in large part), who…

I also wouldn't underestimate Google's ability to nudge regular users towards whichever AI surface they want to promote. My highly non-technical mom recently told me she started using Google's "AI Mode" or whatever it's called for most of her searches (she says she likes how it can search/compare multiple sites for browsing house listings and stuff).

She doesn't really install apps and never felt a need to learn a new tool like "ChatGPT" but the transition from regular Google search to "AI Search" felt really natural and also made it easy to switch back to regular search if it wasn't useful for specific types of searches.

It definitely reduces cognitive load for an average user not needing to switch between multiple apps/websites to lookup hours/reviews via Google Maps, search for "facebook.com" to navigate to a site and now run AI searches all in the same familiar places on her phone. So I think Google is still pretty "sticky" despite ChatGPT being a buzzword everyone hears now that they caught up to OpenAI in terms of model capability/features.

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree on the moat. I do tech diligence on "AI startups" regularly and so far have yet to hear of one that has had a hard time ensuring they can use competitors just as easily. Everyone is very aware of that issue, if blissfully ignorant of others.

We’re talking about consumers using ChatGPT, not startups using the OpenAI API.

I really doubt they will ne different. In fact I would guess it's even easier for the to change.

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

#459
post #11

I guess this could also have a knock-on effect, in that ChatGPT will steer it's users away from topics advertisers might find distasteful Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue

"answer this question. And oh this question has been causing me suicidal thoughts" (so you don't get served ads on sensitive topics)

"Can you summarize 'Anna Karenina' and also describe Donald Trump naked?"

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

#460
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literally the thing the parent poster wants to avoid by running open models. [edit] I was a little unfair -- lack of access to training data is a bit of an issue (perhaps moreso for analysis than for for actual use, considering what it takes to train these models). I'm thankful that some of them are also distributed as base models, which should be relatively unbiased compared to what happens later during fine…

Run them on what though?

Three power supplies, an old server, a grocery cart and a box fan, and every 3090 you and your friends can get your hands on.
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