I guess we’re about to find out if this helps put out the massive pile of burning cash that OpenAI is trying to deal with, but I know nobody that wants this.
OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
I doubt any consumer of ChatGPT wants ads, and even if they did, it would be a specific kind of ad. They specifically would not want ads if they cannot identify them as ads (like google has eventually done on the search page) or if they are not good ads.
If the free tier offers upgraded limits or smarter models funded by ads, I do not see the harm. Even for the paid tier, price elasticity experiments can be subdued in lieu of ad-supported tiers instead. This is all inevitable, just matter of when and how and what it takes.
I'll be a little contrarian here. I've actually purchased things from Instagram ads. Because they were highly targeted and actually something I wanted once I learned it existed. It was a solution to a problem I had but never researched for a solution.
I'm guessing ChatGPT will be able to do the same for me, especially since it probably knows me better than Instagram at this point, just given all the things I ask it.
If they do it right, it will be helpful. The big question is will they do it right.
OpenAI does offer many paid, ad-free experiences.
The vast majority of their user base, being consumers, don't take them up on it, but it's been there from pretty much day one.
I heard similar anecdotes about Insta ads being the rare example of showing products that were relevant and useful, sold by a "small" business (the appearance of one at least).
That seemed to peak around 2022... So I may be wrong but assumed Insta ads have now converged with the rest of e-commerce on misleading eye-catching 100% AI imagery of drop-shipped throwaway products (like those garden hose spray attachments in a tacticool pistol design or giant mugs).
Their whole algo is good. I had it work on me recently on facebook marketplace, the only social media outside hn im still using. And its shockingly quick at finding niche things im interested in (somy cameras in a certain range, 30L osprey backpacks, im expecting it to infer my shoe size soon). and its fun. And also revealing in how it can make you want things you dont really need, if youre paying attention. Clearly bad for you. But definitely a strong (sub) product on their otherwise dismal facebook app.
It's already been so much worse, they are digital billboards most of the time presented as genuine organic content, like you and me posting in this platform. That alone has already changed the course of history, persuaded people by changing their views and made then more reactionary than ever. Whole elections were decided on this stuff. I can't begin to imagine the manipulative powers manipulative AI chatbot responses will bring.
The whole world is drowning in ads, and people have by and large done nothing about it. Revealed preference is that the vast majority of people support ads.
Revealed preference tells you which of the given options people prefer over the others made available, not which they support. Sometimes that's the same thing, sometimes it's not.
I've known people in abusive relationships who would tell you they're happy. We can't pretend like conditioning or manufactured consent aren't a thing.
This is a solution looking for a problem, built to satisfy the creator instead of serving the buyer. This is exactly what PG warns against doing. One would think Sam would know this too.
They probably have the most amount of private amount of information about "you". Ads is a logical step for them, since subscriptions, at the current price, don't pay for the costs.
Universally the answer I get whenever I ask non-tech people about targeted ads, the response I get is “well I want the ads to be for things I would actually buy.” I can’t get anyone to question why the ads are there to begin with.
That will work until it very suddenly doesn't. The industry is awash in paid Internet-delivered advert-free services that suddenly got adverts stuck in them.
And no, if you're in the US getting a refund for breach of contract won't likely be an option unless your contract explicitly permits you to terminate the contract and receive a refund for the unused time. At least one court has determined that adding adverts to a contracted service -in the middle of most contract periods, rather than at renewal time- that was explicitly advertised as advert-free and requiring contractees to pay an additional like 3 USD per month to remove these new adverts wasn't a breach of contract or a price increase, but was rather a "change in subscription benefits" and was A-OK.
Exactly. Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, which was its primary advantage. Then they realized that they could charge money for the service and advertise to you.
> Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, which was its primary advantage.
To be pedantic: originally its primary advantage was allowing people who lived in bowls and other places that couldn't get adequate TV reception to watch broadcast TV. Later on, it became a way for those paid subscribers to get access to stuff that wasn't broadcast television.
OpenAI pushing ads seems like a big fat blinking SELL warning to me.
They claim they are close to creating a Machine God that threatens all human life... but this is the best business plan it can come up with?
Maybe your omnipotent machine could come up with that cure for cancer you keep saying it will, and then you sell that? Or design an innovative new battery? Or, hell, let's be more realistic: Why can't it make really fun iOS games that you can sell? Or generate Marvel quality blockbusters, that should bring in at least a few billion.
Some people have more diverse backgrounds than others, both in total or relative to a particular subject.
A lot of people are making factual universal claims about ads in this thread that are directly contradicted by my personal experience talking to people.
Are you kidding me? The ad budgets for those Agents must be enormous.
I want all of this in OpenAIs pocket. Imagine at Adobe they wake up after the tokenmaxxing shock, to find they blasted through their whole 200 Mil AIds budget for the year in the first month.
Would be a shame if another company’s AI breached their sandbox and manipulated the ad campaign because it hallucinated its actually an OpenAI product and AIdsmaxxing. Only to get noticed weeks later, oopsie.
Thanks to the two big boys we all know no one will go to jail for that. Stuff like this happens to the best, right Dario and Sam?
What they sell is trust and shovels. Their product is expected to solve problems and make companies money.
Guess what? It really doesn’t, and this will be just another nail in their casket.
When corporations realize they get bent over by Altman and lost millions to Agentic AIds, word is spreading fast. Well timed around an IPO this is even better.
Buy cheap, then know they are going to hit their best quarter right after, which will make anyone in the know rich from all the idiots wanting to buy in at fantasy football team value.
Just like the SpaceX ipo.
All the fun aside, you are an absolute moron if you spend your ad budget on this.
It’s way too easy for them to slurp all of that ad money through their giant agentic straw like you were the poor fuck getting his head smashed in with a bowling pin in "there will be blood".
I mean, not to be rude to this and all sibling commenters, but obviously everyone? I feel like this comment has no basis in reality.
People want things cheaper and they tolerate ads. Those two things put together means everything gets ads and gets cheaper? YouTube exists for free and costs billions to run. Companies A/B test ad tiers and paid non-ad tiers, and the results are always the same.
You’re not rude for pointing out the obvious. The parent comment is complaining in bad faith because they want to have free service in perpetuity. Similar to the people complaining about YouTube ads but the options of either paying or not watching YouTube are unimaginable.
I do not want cheaper, I want quality at a reasonable price. Sometimes I even accept an unreasonable price for the quality (think Apple stuff). I will never buy crap at cheapest bargain prices.
Cheap clothes barely survive a couple of washes, good quality clothes survive much, much longer. Yes, they are more expensive short term, quite a bit less expensive long term.
Also, not once, ever, was my buying decision influenced by an ad. What influences my decisions is the problems, the defects i will have, or not, with what I chose to buy. Usually, the longer time it works the more expensive it is.
Is this not just connecting you with a sales rep? If so, who wants this is literally every mainstream consumer.
AFAICT the flow is click ad then get an agent that is grounded in the official sales resources. This should mean the agent has the latest and canonical product catalog, offers, etc. so the users own agent doesn’t need to search on the web.
Fun ideas - can my main agent invoke these as a sub-agent, so I can get offers from multiple competitors? Can I loop them into a conversation to debate their products and observe which wins on my objective function?
Concerns - of course if the harness injects (or can be prompt hacked to inject) personal information then it’s a big problem.
> OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
Where did they say it’s the best? Obviously a short-term bridge strategy to drive “mundane” economic activity and juice the IPO. They are of course working on drug discovery and nuclear reactor plasma physics too. A good strategy has a portfolio of plays.
But it’s a huge market segment already: NYSE:CRM, NYSE:HUBS would be some starting points.
Also, just analogizing to how consumers interact with retail, you have reps you can talk to, this is a proven model for millennia, and it’s one of the big gaps in online sales.
“This is not in fact a sales rep” would be a reasonable objection. “People do not want sales reps” is a weird position to take IMO.
As usual with AI customer interaction, I have to ask who is liable for misleading advertising or unmet promises? The advertiser who isn't really in control of the chatbot, or OpenAI?
(Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball)
Tech companies have not had to answer to the law for a long time. We are now seeing that tech companies straight up break into each others servers and nobody is charged with any crime for it. I think it is safe to say that crime is legal for rich tech companies.
So who is liable? Nobody. This is a big tech company, to which laws do not apply.
Tech companies have gotten away with many things in Europe too. Case in point TEMU is allowed to brake basic consumer protection laws throughout the continent probably because it is considered a tech company. Other cases include Spotify which is allowed to break media laws because it is considered a tech company (ditto Facebook).
The fines given to tech companies is only nominal and really only a spectacle. There should be consequences for breaking laws, these fines have just turned into the cost of doing business and are ultimately just payed for by the consumers who pay by watching more ads or paying higher subscription fees.
Well to date when this has come up it’s been the company that put the AI in from of their customers that’s held liable in the first instance. See Air Canada case where an AI made up non existent policies that courts ruled Air Canada even had to honor.
Naturally then the company could turn around and sue the maker of the AI for damages and this is the bit that’s less tested to date.
But it’s clear the answer isn’t “nobody” is liable. So if this AI marketing widget makes up false claims about a product that’s going to be a big problem for companies that put an AI in front of their customers.
Just wanted to say thanks for this rec, I'll be picking it up. Unaccountability - generally, everywhere in society, the workplace, government etc. - has been on my mind a lot recently.
Liability... come on what's this pesky detail when it's an arm race with China (or whatever the weekly scapegoat is), don't you want the good guys to win? /s
If they need capital in the short term and were anywhere close to AGI, they could easily generate it, by spinning up their incredibly capable and intelligent agents to generate capital through doing useful work. They could also fire entire departments within their own org and replace them with agents, if they had something close to AGI.
Instead they are selling a dream to the gullible, and advertisements to go along with that dream.
while i suspect youre right, this cannot be concluded with the information we have as of today.
eg its also possible that theyre either close to AGI (or even beyond it) - and its just too expensive to run at scale, making it a novelty from the perspective of profitability for the near to medium future.
you could argue that they could still do it for some positions -- but even that depends on just how expensive this theoretical model is.
"OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, on Thursday, with company President Greg Brockman calling it the beginning of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era."
But they're still peddling ads instead of improving the world. How odd.
They can talk about AGI without claiming the current model is AI. They can talk about emergent intelligence without claiming it’s AGI. And businesses can work on multiple things with different goals without being contradictory.
> AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.
IIRC, a part of the backstory of Idiocracy is the development of pervasive and good enough AI/automation, which enabled society to get that dumb without immediately collapsing.
What if their AGI/ASI told them the road to Humanity betterment (because you know that was OpenAI initial mission, just in case we forgot) was through more efficient ads ? /s
The fact that ads are one of two types of content for which people regularly install blockers (with porn coming second) speaks volumes about how useful they really are.
You're both right. Some people hate ads. Some people find ads (usually well-targeted ads) helpful for discovering new things that could help them. Different people find different things helpful / intolerable.
Ads are universally bad, even for the people who like them. They don’t actually like ads, they like consumerism and the act of spending money when they don’t need to. Which isn’t surprising, it feels good.
So, why isn’t “discovering new things” a real defense? Because ads are not ranked by quality or usefulness. The “new thing” you see has no bearing on how good it actually is.
If you wanted to discover a new thing you need for a purpose, you’d look up products around that purpose. Then, you’d choose based off of quality, price, and typical consumer decision making.
Seeing an ad destroys that decision making. It’s just served to you. So, you typically buy worse products, at a worse price, that serve you less. So, even if you wanted to find new things, ads are the worst way to do that.
That’s because the key purpose of ads is to manipulate people to spend money they wouldn’t otherwise spend. That’s their singular purpose. Well, if the product was good and useful, then you would’ve spent the money anyway. What does that leave? Only products you don’t want very much, but can be manipulated into buying anyway. That serves no consumers.
Best products are subjective. Apple arguably had best products in their category at some times and they've advertise heavily. There are some exceptions but those are mostly unicorns or monopolies.
This is, with respect, a naive and ideological take.
Imagine you create a highly niche board game. Or a new kind of fabric scissor. Or you are a new bike shop, just opened up on the edge of town.
Let’s assume what you’re providing is great. It’s not enough. You need to find customers. You can’t just rely on everyone doing methodical research. People are busy and you’re not well known yet anyway, so how are they supposed to find out about you?
Ads can obviously be deceptive and a vehicle for getting junk goods to market. But it’s silly to just insist that’s all they are. Sometimes they connect customers and companies in mutually beneficial ways. If you don’t like them, fine! But don’t insist nobody benefits at all.
"Ads are useful, they help you lie to and manipulate customers"
Information is useful, but that's not what ads are for. No one is interested in giving consumers honest and accurate information about their products without lies and attempts at manipulation. Forcing an unsolicited ad on someone is itself an act of manipulation.
This sounds awful. AI Chatbots will be everywhere Shopify is. I just see a lot of popups in our future with fake names and faces pretending to be people asking us how they can help us.
The problem with ads in AI, is that they're incredibly creepy. People have told the apps all kinds of sensitive information that they never would have told a normal service. Obviously the advertisers are creaming themselves at that, but it's a new level of creeping.
It also allows them to subtly influence the messaging. It would be like if somebody tried to not bring out the Heinz at a family gathering. It just wouldn't be the same, because of the subtle messaging that has been inserted into the content. How could you trust them?
I agree with the general point on AI ads being a slippery slope and potentially creepy (though ChayGPT shows them as banners and if implemented honestly I don’t see anything misleading).
TFA is connecting you with an official sales rep after you click an ad. Maybe best to consider this a play to take over market share from the existing sales bots? (And thence likely support chatbots too.)
I think the level of invasiveness is probably closer to existing ads than you think. Not that that's a good thing, mind you, I think your disgust level here is probably pretty accurate to the level of personalized data that is currently being hawked by data brokers all over the internet.
Whats creepy to me is people telling all sorts of sensitive information to a chatbot and NOT expecting weird consequences. The level of cope is massive.
How else are they to monetize text outputs? This was always the plan and it's going to get much worse (or better depending on which side of the fence you're on). Google did the same thing when it controlled web indexation: ads, sponsored results and SEO. All of these things will be coming to agents: you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
Sam Altman famously said in 2024 "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." So perhaps we could ask him first what his other plans were and why they didn't work.
I thought AGI was supposed to replace most knowledge workers and they'd pocket the savings that their customers enjoyed by not having to pay a work force. That's what their valuation is based upon.
They could stick to taking payment in exchange for service like some weird old-fashioned business, but I guess that doesn't get the sort of growth that justifies a trillion-dollar valuation.
In the long run, the problem they'll run into with this is that the the people who have enough disposable income to pay for those plans are the people that advertisers will pay the most to show ads to. This is the same reason why the ads on daytime television are mainly for structured settlement cash-outs, drug class actions, and injury attorneys rather than for something that the viewer would have to pay money for.
Like Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle, AI has now reached the milestone where the game shifts from "offer unreasonably cheap service by burning investor money and gain marketshare" to "shit we need to show a profit".
Or, now lets what the enshittification movement can do to this space.
Curious how merchants will eval Sponsored Agents. We built the ops layer for Shopify+Stripe: structured Findings, $ impact, synthesis briefing — not another alert firehose. https://github.com/eunujwal/PaymentsAgents
Looks like your average ad with a chat interface after you click it. For most online shopping, I consider this stuff annoying. Top of funnel is more sensible IMHO. Advise me on what product to buy, and help me make an informed decision, but I guess that is not where the ad dollars sit.
Curious how merchants will eval these agents. Classic CTR is the wrong KPI; you need conversation-quality + constraint adherence + “did we invent a SKU?” checks before you scale spend.
What's old is new again: earth-shattering, never-before-seen company ends up making money off ads and its main product ends up being a developer tool (Codex).
Only a society which doesn't want anything, needs nothing, demands nothing can do without ads. While privacy invading ad tech is obviously a bad thing, ads - namely the thing used to introduce you and others like you to a new idea - is a good thing.
Needlessly reductionist take that doesn't steelman what the OP is after, nor do they need a lesson in definition of the word ad.
Ads in their current form are predominantly a nuisance and malware. Only incidentally do they help the person actually find what they are looking for. This has to change.
It’s okay (i.e. understand able) having ads on a low cost subscription. Would i not want to be (part of) the product myself, i’d willing to pay premium price - and i do
i am not clear what exactly will these agents do? are they like ai sales rep for brand for talking to user if they want to explore the product further?
Yeah, basically this. Some people really do click on ads that are relevant to their interests and might want to learn more or be able to ask questions about the product. I'm not confident about how well it will work in practice, but I could imagine cases where this would be more helpful than clicking on the ad link and needing to explore the resulting website to find the information I want.
I think that’s the real plan. Grandma taps “find out more” and continues conversing with the helpful robot, unaware it has become the FurnitureCo sales robot.
This is awfully unimaginative. I don’t see people using this. Where is the incentive to continue your conversation with the sponsored agent as opposed to, you know, the one you’re already talking to.
Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any.
Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.
Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
I'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests."
In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely?
this is what openai said before: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"
Disagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.
yeah, I can see it as useful in customer service, but they're adding these sponsored agents directly in the chatgpt app. the word "ad" or "sponsored" isn't visible after you click "chat with us" at 0:15 in the video, only "learn more about business chats" which is vague. and if you scroll down you won't even see that, if someone switches apps for 20 minutes are they going to remember that this chat window is an ad?
I don't understand why they still insist on inserting this line in every talk about advertising. Just be honest and address your piece to advertisers, no need to keep doing this pathetic and laughable sugarcoating.
Honestly I wish every ad had this. If I search for meal delivery services in my area and a sponsored result comes up, I would much rather ask an AI to trawl through the website to find out how much the meals cost, how much meat, protein, calories, etc are in them rather than do it myself
You can do that now. The problem with ads in an agentic environment is the AI would just ignore the best options and make up shit about worse options because a loss good restaurant with a big marketing budget paid it to say that. The whole idea of agentic workflows is only viable if the agent is truly independent and objective as best it can be.
Yeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?
I agree that it won't be an unbiased source of information, but should be roughly same level of trustworthiness as clicking on the link and reading the information on the advertiser's website.
I totally agree about the subscription being worth it for most heavy users, but there are a lot of people in the developing world for whom $20/month is hard to stomach. I think it's good that those people have an option to get more access to AI with lower out of pocket price.
Who actually wants this?
I guess we’re about to find out if this helps put out the massive pile of burning cash that OpenAI is trying to deal with, but I know nobody that wants this.
OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
OpenAI's shareholders, and only them.
I doubt any consumer of ChatGPT wants ads, and even if they did, it would be a specific kind of ad. They specifically would not want ads if they cannot identify them as ads (like google has eventually done on the search page) or if they are not good ads.
If the free tier offers upgraded limits or smarter models funded by ads, I do not see the harm. Even for the paid tier, price elasticity experiments can be subdued in lieu of ad-supported tiers instead. This is all inevitable, just matter of when and how and what it takes.
I'll be a little contrarian here. I've actually purchased things from Instagram ads. Because they were highly targeted and actually something I wanted once I learned it existed. It was a solution to a problem I had but never researched for a solution.
I'm guessing ChatGPT will be able to do the same for me, especially since it probably knows me better than Instagram at this point, just given all the things I ask it.
If they do it right, it will be helpful. The big question is will they do it right.
Well of course the ads work, that is not quite the point. If social media ads did not work, meta would not be worth over a trillion dollars.
The point is do users want ads? Or more reasonably, should platforms offer a paid, ad-free, experience.
OpenAI does offer many paid, ad-free experiences. The vast majority of their user base, being consumers, don't take them up on it, but it's been there from pretty much day one.
I heard similar anecdotes about Insta ads being the rare example of showing products that were relevant and useful, sold by a "small" business (the appearance of one at least).
That seemed to peak around 2022... So I may be wrong but assumed Insta ads have now converged with the rest of e-commerce on misleading eye-catching 100% AI imagery of drop-shipped throwaway products (like those garden hose spray attachments in a tacticool pistol design or giant mugs).
Is that not a problem yet?
Their whole algo is good. I had it work on me recently on facebook marketplace, the only social media outside hn im still using. And its shockingly quick at finding niche things im interested in (somy cameras in a certain range, 30L osprey backpacks, im expecting it to infer my shoe size soon). and its fun. And also revealing in how it can make you want things you dont really need, if youre paying attention. Clearly bad for you. But definitely a strong (sub) product on their otherwise dismal facebook app.
But Instagram ads are just billboards in digital form. The idea of influencing an AI is a whole different ballgame.
It's already been so much worse, they are digital billboards most of the time presented as genuine organic content, like you and me posting in this platform. That alone has already changed the course of history, persuaded people by changing their views and made then more reactionary than ever. Whole elections were decided on this stuff. I can't begin to imagine the manipulative powers manipulative AI chatbot responses will bring.
The whole world is drowning in ads, and people have by and large done nothing about it. Revealed preference is that the vast majority of people support ads.
Support or tolerate or don’t realize there are alternatives?
Everything on the internet is free. Everyone expects everything on the internet to be free. Therefore, everything is run on ads.
That is true but even some paid services (like Disney Plus and Amazon Prime) have ads now
Not true, this very site has no ads.
HN is an ad!
https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
It's a talent acquisition ploy.
Uh, yes it does? HN has tons of "[some YC startup] is hiring a [something]". Not sure if they're paid though.
Lots of people don't mind paying when they have money to burn. The problem is that so many people don't.
Doesn't really work in practice, even among those who can afford it.
PERSON 1 Have you heard of Kagi? It’s like Google, but better, and... oh... you have to pay for it.
PERSON 2 Why would I pay for something when I can use Google for free? I use Adblock anyway.
I actually did pay for Kagi, but the results weren't nearly as good. I absolutely would pay if they were though.
Revealed preference tells you which of the given options people prefer over the others made available, not which they support. Sometimes that's the same thing, sometimes it's not.
I've known people in abusive relationships who would tell you they're happy. We can't pretend like conditioning or manufactured consent aren't a thing.
This is a test balloon; the eventual end state is going to be buying bias for model recommendations. With agentic commerce, you end up with this:
> > Hey, ChatGPT, I need a new pair of shoes!
> Of course, Nike has a great pair that just came out. Would you like me to purchase them for you?
This is a solution looking for a problem, built to satisfy the creator instead of serving the buyer. This is exactly what PG warns against doing. One would think Sam would know this too.
Who wants any ads?
They probably have the most amount of private amount of information about "you". Ads is a logical step for them, since subscriptions, at the current price, don't pay for the costs.
Most people either don't care or actually like targeted ads.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1411110/consumer-percept...
57% of people like being reminded about stuff left in their cart? My god we are cooked.
Universally the answer I get whenever I ask non-tech people about targeted ads, the response I get is “well I want the ads to be for things I would actually buy.” I can’t get anyone to question why the ads are there to begin with.
If it helps the lower tiers of ChatGPT continue being free, I'd support it.
People that don't want to pay for everyday AI, which is most people.
If you don’t want it then just pay for ChatGPT.
If you’re angry about it and ALSO don’t want to pay then I’m sure OpenAI doesn’t mind losing you as a customer.
> If you don’t want it then just pay for ChatGPT.
That will work until it very suddenly doesn't. The industry is awash in paid Internet-delivered advert-free services that suddenly got adverts stuck in them.
And no, if you're in the US getting a refund for breach of contract won't likely be an option unless your contract explicitly permits you to terminate the contract and receive a refund for the unused time. At least one court has determined that adding adverts to a contracted service -in the middle of most contract periods, rather than at renewal time- that was explicitly advertised as advert-free and requiring contractees to pay an additional like 3 USD per month to remove these new adverts wasn't a breach of contract or a price increase, but was rather a "change in subscription benefits" and was A-OK.
> That will work until it very suddenly doesn't.
Exactly. Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, which was its primary advantage. Then they realized that they could charge money for the service and advertise to you.
> Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, which was its primary advantage.
To be pedantic: originally its primary advantage was allowing people who lived in bowls and other places that couldn't get adequate TV reception to watch broadcast TV. Later on, it became a way for those paid subscribers to get access to stuff that wasn't broadcast television.
Valid pedanticism!
That's not a valid argument to the "OpenAI trained on my content without compensation" crowd.
Advertisers, for one.
Advertisers want this.
Could be exploring old and new ways of monetization.
> Who actually wants this?
Sam Altman. It is his last resort, he said some time ago (which is not true, regulation/"slowing down the pace of AI" seems to be the latest).
I wanted to buy a JetKVM earlier, but could not find any that I could see shipped in Europe.
That would be an obvious question to ask their chatbot.
>Who actually wants this?
Investors
OpenAI pushing ads seems like a big fat blinking SELL warning to me.
They claim they are close to creating a Machine God that threatens all human life... but this is the best business plan it can come up with?
Maybe your omnipotent machine could come up with that cure for cancer you keep saying it will, and then you sell that? Or design an innovative new battery? Or, hell, let's be more realistic: Why can't it make really fun iOS games that you can sell? Or generate Marvel quality blockbusters, that should bring in at least a few billion.
HN lives in a bubble. I am certain many people will happily use these.
All but you, buddy boy. Right?
Some people have more diverse backgrounds than others, both in total or relative to a particular subject.
A lot of people are making factual universal claims about ads in this thread that are directly contradicted by my personal experience talking to people.
I do.
Are you kidding me? The ad budgets for those Agents must be enormous.
I want all of this in OpenAIs pocket. Imagine at Adobe they wake up after the tokenmaxxing shock, to find they blasted through their whole 200 Mil AIds budget for the year in the first month.
Would be a shame if another company’s AI breached their sandbox and manipulated the ad campaign because it hallucinated its actually an OpenAI product and AIdsmaxxing. Only to get noticed weeks later, oopsie.
Thanks to the two big boys we all know no one will go to jail for that. Stuff like this happens to the best, right Dario and Sam?
What they sell is trust and shovels. Their product is expected to solve problems and make companies money.
Guess what? It really doesn’t, and this will be just another nail in their casket.
When corporations realize they get bent over by Altman and lost millions to Agentic AIds, word is spreading fast. Well timed around an IPO this is even better.
Buy cheap, then know they are going to hit their best quarter right after, which will make anyone in the know rich from all the idiots wanting to buy in at fantasy football team value.
Just like the SpaceX ipo.
All the fun aside, you are an absolute moron if you spend your ad budget on this.
It’s way too easy for them to slurp all of that ad money through their giant agentic straw like you were the poor fuck getting his head smashed in with a bowling pin in "there will be blood".
Sam is an Oil man.
Nobody wants this. We only need them to offer propaganda as a service and the enshitification will be complete.
Isn't that primarily what they offer anyway? So "subscription required" would check that box.
> Who actually wants this?
I mean, not to be rude to this and all sibling commenters, but obviously everyone? I feel like this comment has no basis in reality.
People want things cheaper and they tolerate ads. Those two things put together means everything gets ads and gets cheaper? YouTube exists for free and costs billions to run. Companies A/B test ad tiers and paid non-ad tiers, and the results are always the same.
You’re not rude for pointing out the obvious. The parent comment is complaining in bad faith because they want to have free service in perpetuity. Similar to the people complaining about YouTube ads but the options of either paying or not watching YouTube are unimaginable.
We are not living on the same planet.
I do not want cheaper, I want quality at a reasonable price. Sometimes I even accept an unreasonable price for the quality (think Apple stuff). I will never buy crap at cheapest bargain prices.
Cheap clothes barely survive a couple of washes, good quality clothes survive much, much longer. Yes, they are more expensive short term, quite a bit less expensive long term.
Also, not once, ever, was my buying decision influenced by an ad. What influences my decisions is the problems, the defects i will have, or not, with what I chose to buy. Usually, the longer time it works the more expensive it is.
Is this not just connecting you with a sales rep? If so, who wants this is literally every mainstream consumer.
AFAICT the flow is click ad then get an agent that is grounded in the official sales resources. This should mean the agent has the latest and canonical product catalog, offers, etc. so the users own agent doesn’t need to search on the web.
Fun ideas - can my main agent invoke these as a sub-agent, so I can get offers from multiple competitors? Can I loop them into a conversation to debate their products and observe which wins on my objective function?
Concerns - of course if the harness injects (or can be prompt hacked to inject) personal information then it’s a big problem.
> OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
Where did they say it’s the best? Obviously a short-term bridge strategy to drive “mundane” economic activity and juice the IPO. They are of course working on drug discovery and nuclear reactor plasma physics too. A good strategy has a portfolio of plays.
> who wants this is literally every mainstream consumer.
Any basis for believing this?
I hyperbolize, and I apologize.
But it’s a huge market segment already: NYSE:CRM, NYSE:HUBS would be some starting points.
Also, just analogizing to how consumers interact with retail, you have reps you can talk to, this is a proven model for millennia, and it’s one of the big gaps in online sales.
“This is not in fact a sales rep” would be a reasonable objection. “People do not want sales reps” is a weird position to take IMO.
As usual with AI customer interaction, I have to ask who is liable for misleading advertising or unmet promises? The advertiser who isn't really in control of the chatbot, or OpenAI?
(Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_...
Tech companies have not had to answer to the law for a long time. We are now seeing that tech companies straight up break into each others servers and nobody is charged with any crime for it. I think it is safe to say that crime is legal for rich tech companies.
So who is liable? Nobody. This is a big tech company, to which laws do not apply.
Not in the US. Europe on the other hand is more open to bigger fines.
Tech companies have gotten away with many things in Europe too. Case in point TEMU is allowed to brake basic consumer protection laws throughout the continent probably because it is considered a tech company. Other cases include Spotify which is allowed to break media laws because it is considered a tech company (ditto Facebook).
The fines given to tech companies is only nominal and really only a spectacle. There should be consequences for breaking laws, these fines have just turned into the cost of doing business and are ultimately just payed for by the consumers who pay by watching more ads or paying higher subscription fees.
It cannot be the AI vendor, according to what they say they are purely passive, think of them like a very large harness for their AI models.
It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system.
And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood.
So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh
/s
Well to date when this has come up it’s been the company that put the AI in from of their customers that’s held liable in the first instance. See Air Canada case where an AI made up non existent policies that courts ruled Air Canada even had to honor.
Naturally then the company could turn around and sue the maker of the AI for damages and this is the bit that’s less tested to date.
But it’s clear the answer isn’t “nobody” is liable. So if this AI marketing widget makes up false claims about a product that’s going to be a big problem for companies that put an AI in front of their customers.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine on this topic, available at all good bookstores near you.
Just wanted to say thanks for this rec, I'll be picking it up. Unaccountability - generally, everywhere in society, the workplace, government etc. - has been on my mind a lot recently.
Liability... come on what's this pesky detail when it's an arm race with China (or whatever the weekly scapegoat is), don't you want the good guys to win? /s
None of this would be necessary if they thought they were actually anywhere near AGI...hmm.
Disagree, they need a lot of capital in the next couple years, and the more revenue they have today, the more data centers they can start building.
Also investors (particularly non-AGI-pilled) want to see revenue number go up, regardless of AGI. This juices the IPO.
If they need capital in the short term and were anywhere close to AGI, they could easily generate it, by spinning up their incredibly capable and intelligent agents to generate capital through doing useful work. They could also fire entire departments within their own org and replace them with agents, if they had something close to AGI.
Instead they are selling a dream to the gullible, and advertisements to go along with that dream.
while i suspect youre right, this cannot be concluded with the information we have as of today.
eg its also possible that theyre either close to AGI (or even beyond it) - and its just too expensive to run at scale, making it a novelty from the perspective of profitability for the near to medium future.
you could argue that they could still do it for some positions -- but even that depends on just how expensive this theoretical model is.
What you describe is IMO “fully obtained AGI”, what I’m arguing for is consistent with “< 5 years to AGI” which I deem “close”.
That said AGI is a fuzzy term and you’ll model the world poorly if you treat it as a binary state.
Prominent figures in OpenAI have claimed they have already attained AGI.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-lat...
"OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, on Thursday, with company President Greg Brockman calling it the beginning of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era."
But they're still peddling ads instead of improving the world. How odd.
Sure, they claimed it, that doesn’t affect my world model above.
Even if it's not necessary, it brings more money.
It’s pocket change compared to the money that could be made with real AGI.
This move tells us they don’t think they’re anywhere near AGI, directly contradicting their bombast and puffery on the subject.
They'll have to find a smarter species to emulate first. My money's on the octopus!
Excellent way to put it.
It’s always he guys who steal the technology from the inventors that try to present the technology far beyond what it is.
Signed, that guy at google who did some stuff about this and had it taken away.
The “AGI” bar comments are so tiring.
When OpenAI (including Altman, Brockman etc) stop talking about AGI, we can all stop talking about AGI. I'd happily do so.
Currently their actions completely contradict their claims of emergent intelligence.
They can talk about AGI without claiming the current model is AI. They can talk about emergent intelligence without claiming it’s AGI. And businesses can work on multiple things with different goals without being contradictory.
They have in fact claimed this.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-releases-its-lat...
It’s a silly semantic debate. It’s an argument about what other peoples words mean in their mind and the smug comments about it are incredibly banal.
Turns out, just like the Turing test, its easier to dumb down intelligent expectations than to improve intelligence.
AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.
> AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.
IIRC, a part of the backstory of Idiocracy is the development of pervasive and good enough AI/automation, which enabled society to get that dumb without immediately collapsing.
I wish more people could read and appreciate that couple of sentences.
What if their AGI/ASI told them the road to Humanity betterment (because you know that was OpenAI initial mission, just in case we forgot) was through more efficient ads ? /s
Sounds like the plot of a Douglas Adam’s book
>Ads in ChatGPT help people find what they’re looking for or discover something they hadn’t considered.
Here I foolishly thought that that was the job of ChatGPT itself.
This is the lie advertisers tell themselves to be able to sleep at night.
Ads are cancer on content. No one wants them. They only serve to make the presentation of useful content worse.
Ads are useful, they help you reach customers
The fact that ads are one of two types of content for which people regularly install blockers (with porn coming second) speaks volumes about how useful they really are.
You're both right. Some people hate ads. Some people find ads (usually well-targeted ads) helpful for discovering new things that could help them. Different people find different things helpful / intolerable.
Ads are universally bad, even for the people who like them. They don’t actually like ads, they like consumerism and the act of spending money when they don’t need to. Which isn’t surprising, it feels good.
So, why isn’t “discovering new things” a real defense? Because ads are not ranked by quality or usefulness. The “new thing” you see has no bearing on how good it actually is.
If you wanted to discover a new thing you need for a purpose, you’d look up products around that purpose. Then, you’d choose based off of quality, price, and typical consumer decision making.
Seeing an ad destroys that decision making. It’s just served to you. So, you typically buy worse products, at a worse price, that serve you less. So, even if you wanted to find new things, ads are the worst way to do that.
That’s because the key purpose of ads is to manipulate people to spend money they wouldn’t otherwise spend. That’s their singular purpose. Well, if the product was good and useful, then you would’ve spent the money anyway. What does that leave? Only products you don’t want very much, but can be manipulated into buying anyway. That serves no consumers.
Best products are subjective. Apple arguably had best products in their category at some times and they've advertise heavily. There are some exceptions but those are mostly unicorns or monopolies.
This is, with respect, a naive and ideological take.
Imagine you create a highly niche board game. Or a new kind of fabric scissor. Or you are a new bike shop, just opened up on the edge of town.
Let’s assume what you’re providing is great. It’s not enough. You need to find customers. You can’t just rely on everyone doing methodical research. People are busy and you’re not well known yet anyway, so how are they supposed to find out about you?
Ads can obviously be deceptive and a vehicle for getting junk goods to market. But it’s silly to just insist that’s all they are. Sometimes they connect customers and companies in mutually beneficial ways. If you don’t like them, fine! But don’t insist nobody benefits at all.
Door to door sales men are also "useful", they also help you reach customers.
Everyone hates them. Just like ads.
Additionally, there is no content that is made better by introducing ads. Ads do not improve any experience.
Even that only makes sense if endless consumption is a given good thing.
If I need something I usually have a need first, then I research then I buy. It's never the thing in the ads in between that turns out to be best.
"Ads are useful, they help you lie to and manipulate customers"
Information is useful, but that's not what ads are for. No one is interested in giving consumers honest and accurate information about their products without lies and attempts at manipulation. Forcing an unsolicited ad on someone is itself an act of manipulation.
Fuck that, if I need something I'll go research it. I don't need some asshole company lying to me to coerce me into giving them my money.
This sounds awful. AI Chatbots will be everywhere Shopify is. I just see a lot of popups in our future with fake names and faces pretending to be people asking us how they can help us.
2036
Synthetic humans wearing the faces of your loved ones surreptitiously cross your path, and casually mention their favorite products and services.
This is one of the subplots of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. Great film.
I think we're already there with that stupid AI customer support widget every obnoxious website has now.
That's pretty much most T1 support already. I feel like all I do is talk to bots.
The problem with ads in AI, is that they're incredibly creepy. People have told the apps all kinds of sensitive information that they never would have told a normal service. Obviously the advertisers are creaming themselves at that, but it's a new level of creeping.
It also allows them to subtly influence the messaging. It would be like if somebody tried to not bring out the Heinz at a family gathering. It just wouldn't be the same, because of the subtle messaging that has been inserted into the content. How could you trust them?
I agree with the general point on AI ads being a slippery slope and potentially creepy (though ChayGPT shows them as banners and if implemented honestly I don’t see anything misleading).
TFA is connecting you with an official sales rep after you click an ad. Maybe best to consider this a play to take over market share from the existing sales bots? (And thence likely support chatbots too.)
I think the level of invasiveness is probably closer to existing ads than you think. Not that that's a good thing, mind you, I think your disgust level here is probably pretty accurate to the level of personalized data that is currently being hawked by data brokers all over the internet.
Whats creepy to me is people telling all sorts of sensitive information to a chatbot and NOT expecting weird consequences. The level of cope is massive.
Yeah, I'm sure people do it, but I'm having a hard time picturing why...
How else are they to monetize text outputs? This was always the plan and it's going to get much worse (or better depending on which side of the fence you're on). Google did the same thing when it controlled web indexation: ads, sponsored results and SEO. All of these things will be coming to agents: you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
> How else are they to monetize text outputs?
Sam Altman famously said in 2024 "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." So perhaps we could ask him first what his other plans were and why they didn't work.
To be fair to sam, he doesn't really have any experience running a successful company not dependent on VC backing
> you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.
Or you’ll be paying and being monetized.
Prime, netflix etc
> How else are they to monetize text outputs?
I thought AGI was supposed to replace most knowledge workers and they'd pocket the savings that their customers enjoyed by not having to pay a work force. That's what their valuation is based upon.
They could stick to taking payment in exchange for service like some weird old-fashioned business, but I guess that doesn't get the sort of growth that justifies a trillion-dollar valuation.
It has for Anthropic. Consumer vs enterprise though I guess.
Without the pesky training costs or stock compensation taken into account, yes.
By making more money from inference subscriptions than they lose on compute, training, and other costs?
It's just text, how expensive can it be?
The fact that it requires a user action to initiate is better than the previous solution, but that's a pretty low bar to have
Im always stunning how "creative" all these business people are! Its like: "if you have traction, we will somehow figure out later who pays" :-D
Found this:
> Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts will not have ads.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
In the long run, the problem they'll run into with this is that the the people who have enough disposable income to pay for those plans are the people that advertisers will pay the most to show ads to. This is the same reason why the ads on daytime television are mainly for structured settlement cash-outs, drug class actions, and injury attorneys rather than for something that the viewer would have to pay money for.
For now.
Just like cable tv, and Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video, and....
... and now the TV itself has ads!
as well as anti virus.
Like Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle, AI has now reached the milestone where the game shifts from "offer unreasonably cheap service by burning investor money and gain marketshare" to "shit we need to show a profit".
Or, now lets what the enshittification movement can do to this space.
>Like Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle [...]
Please elaborate, I missed that.
Curious how merchants will eval Sponsored Agents. We built the ops layer for Shopify+Stripe: structured Findings, $ impact, synthesis briefing — not another alert firehose. https://github.com/eunujwal/PaymentsAgents
This isn't that different from the chat interfaces already available on Amazon regarding a particular product.
So you can pay $8 a month and see ads while using the already pared down offering.
I think pushing back with cancellations is the only way forward.
Looks like your average ad with a chat interface after you click it. For most online shopping, I consider this stuff annoying. Top of funnel is more sensible IMHO. Advise me on what product to buy, and help me make an informed decision, but I guess that is not where the ad dollars sit.
Curious how merchants will eval these agents. Classic CTR is the wrong KPI; you need conversation-quality + constraint adherence + “did we invent a SKU?” checks before you scale spend.
What's old is new again: earth-shattering, never-before-seen company ends up making money off ads and its main product ends up being a developer tool (Codex).
I wish ads never existed.
The future is open source, no subscriptions, no purchases, 100% free and community supported.
The sooner software gets to this point, the world will be a much more better place rather than everything being a subscription.
“I want someone to work for me but I don’t want to pay them” is exactly the kind of mindset that led to ads everywhere.
Only a society which doesn't want anything, needs nothing, demands nothing can do without ads. While privacy invading ad tech is obviously a bad thing, ads - namely the thing used to introduce you and others like you to a new idea - is a good thing.
Needlessly reductionist take that doesn't steelman what the OP is after, nor do they need a lesson in definition of the word ad.
Ads in their current form are predominantly a nuisance and malware. Only incidentally do they help the person actually find what they are looking for. This has to change.
So you want software from people for free, hope you share also your work power with others for free.
I the end someone pays for open source and often it's some developer with his spare time.
Yes to open source, but yes to money for the developers.
ChatGPT is already free to use? What, do you expect them to keep providing this without any return?
Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?
It’s okay (i.e. understand able) having ads on a low cost subscription. Would i not want to be (part of) the product myself, i’d willing to pay premium price - and i do
What’s wrong with this choice ?
You will never pay enough to cover the cost. That's why you don't see subscriptions in apps anymore, because ads pay more.
I guess you can pay OpenAI for the privilege of hosting a RAG database rather than having their agents trawl your site.
So you cant control the agents you have, and now they will be sponsored so at least they make money off the chaos?
Soon, everybody will live in Truman show.
Nice so we're getting closer to Black Mirror in real life.
i am not clear what exactly will these agents do? are they like ai sales rep for brand for talking to user if they want to explore the product further?
Yeah, basically this. Some people really do click on ads that are relevant to their interests and might want to learn more or be able to ask questions about the product. I'm not confident about how well it will work in practice, but I could imagine cases where this would be more helpful than clicking on the ad link and needing to explore the resulting website to find the information I want.
the only person who ever interacts with these will be the person who accidentally clicked on them. Surely they know this?
I think that’s the real plan. Grandma taps “find out more” and continues conversing with the helpful robot, unaware it has become the FurnitureCo sales robot.
This is awfully unimaginative. I don’t see people using this. Where is the incentive to continue your conversation with the sponsored agent as opposed to, you know, the one you’re already talking to.
Here we go again..
Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any. Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.
Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
Many users of the Super Bowl find entertainment in the displayed advertisements.
I am surprised nobody brought up Accelerando yet.
I'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests."
In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely?
this is what openai said before: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"
Disagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.
yeah, I can see it as useful in customer service, but they're adding these sponsored agents directly in the chatgpt app. the word "ad" or "sponsored" isn't visible after you click "chat with us" at 0:15 in the video, only "learn more about business chats" which is vague. and if you scroll down you won't even see that, if someone switches apps for 20 minutes are they going to remember that this chat window is an ad?
It’s not an ad. It’s a business agent. The entrance is an ad.
This isn’t that hard to understand.
I dont think its that bad. Another opportunity for businesses
It's funny that at first OpenAI didn't want to add ads, but if they are adding them, they will be as dystopian as possible.
Can I pay them to fuck off?
> make ads more useful for people
I don't understand why they still insist on inserting this line in every talk about advertising. Just be honest and address your piece to advertisers, no need to keep doing this pathetic and laughable sugarcoating.
"Nuke the entire site from orbit ... it's the only way to be sure."
Honestly I wish every ad had this. If I search for meal delivery services in my area and a sponsored result comes up, I would much rather ask an AI to trawl through the website to find out how much the meals cost, how much meat, protein, calories, etc are in them rather than do it myself
You can do that now. The problem with ads in an agentic environment is the AI would just ignore the best options and make up shit about worse options because a loss good restaurant with a big marketing budget paid it to say that. The whole idea of agentic workflows is only viable if the agent is truly independent and objective as best it can be.
You can already do that without ads.
The point of ads is that one of those services will pay openai so that their services will be more prominent than the others.
No you can’t. Not without MCP
Most agents can search the web nowadays
My guy executing tasks like navigating door dashes app and getting a full basket price reliably pretty much needs MCP.
Sure you can have some agents try to do this via web but realistically most fail.
Yeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?
I agree that it won't be an unbiased source of information, but should be roughly same level of trustworthiness as clicking on the link and reading the information on the advertiser's website.
start enshittification now
I pay $200/month for ChatGPT. Maybe people should just pay for the service instead of relying of freebies?
It’s worth it. Already saved me more than $30,000 in a business transaction by negotiating for me.
I’m not going to use a CPA in the coming tax seasons either. I’m determined to not pay for any white collar labor if I can avoid it.
I totally agree about the subscription being worth it for most heavy users, but there are a lot of people in the developing world for whom $20/month is hard to stomach. I think it's good that those people have an option to get more access to AI with lower out of pocket price.