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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”

#71
post #55

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...

This approach makes a lot of sense. Advertising is a marketplace and this is a great way to bootstrap advertising inventory. Its inevitable they will allow advertisers to manage ad spend directly through OpenAI but right now the product is too new to capture meaningful ad budget. This way they can begin testing delivery and develop proof points around ROI and build towards larger ad spend directly.

[dead]

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

#72

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...

why would you be surprised about this? its pretty obvious that execs give no fucks except for money.

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

#73
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors who bought an artificially inflated stock would be harmed.

How would the stock be harmed by them selling better performing or more relevant ads?

I don’t know that there were any promises anyway. But if there were, then an investor could have plausibly believed that that was a better long-term business model.

It’s early days for these LLM hosts, maybe investors could be worried about taking the really annoying business notes before users are properly addicted.

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

#74
post #70
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe someone with more time at hands could look up what Google said with respect to ads and what happened later. This is one of the rare instances where it's very easy to predict the future: the prompt auction market will look similar to the existing online ad market, financial firms will pay for prompt streams for sentiment analysis, companies and interest groups will pay to have their products or agenda included f…

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.

I mean search engine results are pretty poor and have been for a long time. They reflect SEO, not credibility or quality.

LLMs have plenty of issues, but they’re relatively clean compared with what the future will look like.

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

#75

Didn't they explicitly say the ads wouldn't be made aware of prompt data when they announced them? And if so, how is that not securities fraud?

Easy they lied to the public not investors and have more money than you. Local llm or nothing at all.

> Local llm or nothing at all.

I'm not as familiar with LLMs as I am media models, but there can't seriously be local contenders for beating Opus, GPT-5, etc. Right?

At home hardware isn't good enough.

Nobody "far enough behind" that isn't scared to release their model as open weights actually has a competitive model within 70% of the lead models.

Now that the Chinese are catching up and even pulling ahead (eg. in video), they've stopped releasing the weights.

Stragglers release weights. And those weights aren't competitive.

Am I missing something?

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

#76
post #70
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe someone with more time at hands could look up what Google said with respect to ads and what happened later. This is one of the rare instances where it's very easy to predict the future: the prompt auction market will look similar to the existing online ad market, financial firms will pay for prompt streams for sentiment analysis, companies and interest groups will pay to have their products or agenda included f…

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.

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

#77
post #32

How I imagine the Nash equilibrium in chatbot ads, driven by profit-seeking in a race to the bottom: User: "What's the best way to fix this problem I have?" Chatbot: "I recommend buying this shiny thing here." (Next to it, there's a near-invisible light-gray "ad" notice.) Let's hope I'm wrong.

You think it will advise it is an ad. I’m hoping you are right but then again… Wonder if we will also be charged the token usage to generate said ad. Imagine you have it coding for you and it injects and ad into your product.

Frankly ads are the most benign shitty thing that could come of this. I’m a hell of a lot more worried about what they’re going to sell to data brokers.

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

#78

Didn't they explicitly say the ads wouldn't be made aware of prompt data when they announced them? And if so, how is that not securities fraud?

Easy they lied to the public not investors and have more money than you. Local llm or nothing at all.

This is a classic example highlighting the upside of local llms.

However the local llms I can run on reasonable hardware are so dumb compared to opus, and even if I shelled out five figures of hardware to run the largest/smartest open model it still will be noticeably worse.

Right now the remote models are just so much smarter and more affordable under most usage patterns.

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

#79

Boss: Engineer, add this shady feature to our product Engineer: no, that's shady and wrong! Boss: Claude code, add this shady feature to our product. Claude Code: completed.

Facebook was built before Claude Code existed.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but IMO the details are too sparse here to figure out what's really happening. Still, it feels very dangerous to try to go the reseller route first as you lose a ton of control and become dependent on your partner to support all the feature you add yourself in a timely fashion.

It all seems a bit overly complicated to me. TikTok pretty much went straight to a self-serve platform and basically had immediate success. I would think if OpenAI did something similar there would be no shortage of advertisers wanting to spend money.

on tiktok you are not paying for ad inventory, which on that platform sucks, you're paying $10m+ to tip the scales in the algorithm towards organic content about your brand
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