I would guess that ChatGPT has left at least $100 on the table from me having to do this when literally all it had to do was give me a referral link to Amazon or whatever and I would have clicked the buy button.
Man, this thing is going to be so lucrative when they inject ads into it. Imagine how this is going to combine with the parasocial AI boyfriend/girlfriend people, it's going to be worse than hostess clubs. They'll have to invent whole new categories of nonexistant products for the bots to sell.
There’s a special type of frustration when an LLM is close to being useful but just… isn’t.
What in the history of Sam Altman has lead you to believe he’ll do the right thing instead of the thing that makes him the most money?
I expect some or all of the items I've been shown did exist for sale at some point in the past and information about them was in the training data.
GPT 5 was publicly released in August last year. That data has to be atleast a year old, right?
If I'm comparing Macbook Neo to a Chromebook, it's impossible for the Neo to show up in the training data, and has to use RAG (This is assuming the data is atleast a year old. Seems like OAI isn't doing fresh runs for 5.1, 5.2, etc. but I'm unsure if that's been officially disclosed)
As an example interaction, recently I sent ChatGPT a picture of my soldering station and say I'm having trouble with it being slow to melt and it says "well these are your upgrade options but really all you need is a chunkier tip with more thermal mass, he's a link to a tip set you could try" but then the link is dead and I'm able to google my own similar set and just buy it (it worked great).
Another one was wanting a U-shaped bracket to mount a riser on my desk, and the only ones I could find at the building supply store are L-shaped. I asked Chat about this and it said it's just too niche of an item to be mass produced but suggested I buy from someone doing semi-custom fabrication on etsy. Sure enough... another dead link, but I google it and find the store, and order.
Two cases where I didn't really know what I actually wanted/needed, and Chat successfully filled the gap with information I was able to independently verify afterward, but also Chat missed out on the opportunity to get a referral fee out of my eventual spend.
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...
Again, personally, I'm glad at yet another miss by Altman. But to claim ChatGPT is too new? Apparently hundreds of millions of users doesn't cut it these days. And if anyone thinks OAI has been anything remotely "strategic" around their product, well... Then you must enjoy shooting darts in the dark.
> quite the amateur move to not seize the market opportunity and keep it holistically for themselves
What does this even mean? There are so many businesses, especially in the advertising world, that first start white-label reselling so that you can scale up super easy and quickly. Then once market is captured, you integrate everything. This is a common adtech playbook, and the Meta execs know that as well.
And I say this as someone who founded & exited their own adtech platform.
I would not recommend OpenAI to start developing an RTB platform right now at all. Just first prove there is a market and the value is there.
> They took nothing from Google's paved road of incumbency in this segment.
Google bought / acquired themselves into the online adtech market mostly. Yes they have adwords, which was only really becoming something a decade after Google launched, which they paired with their acquisition of half the adtech giants (DoubleClick, Invite and AdMeld). So yeah, not a great example.
> I'm glad at yet another miss by Altman. But to claim ChatGPT is too new? Apparently hundreds of millions of users doesn't cut it these days.
This is just a useless attack for no reason.
Thank you for your subjective analysis.
> What does this even mean? There are so many businesses, especially in the advertising world, that first start white-label reselling so that you can scale up super easy and quickly. Then once market is captured, you integrate everything. This is a common adtech playbook, and the Meta execs know that as well.
This would be interesting if any of it were true in the case of OAI. They haven't captured the market and they don't appear as if they will. They're at the losing end of Anthropic and Google right now. The Meta execs OAI has don't understand the game today, in my opinion based on their approach.
> And I say this as someone who founded & exited their own adtech platform. > I would not recommend OpenAI to start developing an RTB platform right now at all. Just first prove there is a market and the value is there.
So OAI, their financials, their business models, their number of customers and their competition all aligned with your exit in adtech? Somehow I doubt it, but feel free to share.
> Google bought / acquired themselves into the online adtech market mostly. Yes they have adwords, which was only really becoming something a decade after Google launched, which they paired with their acquisition of half the adtech giants (DoubleClick, Invite and AdMeld). So yeah, not a great example.
Actually, it is a good example. Because when Google did this they had zero competition. Now Google is the competition. So, yeah... In line with the new reality. You don't get to compare OAI with Google 20+ years ago.
> This is just a useless attack for no reason.
No, it's reality for a lot of us. Altman is tied to a lot of unsavory players. If you want to apologize for these types of people then feel free to be their cheerleader. The great part of HN is that these comments have and carry market sentiments (all across the board). I could say your comments are useless, out-of-touch, founder drivel... But I haven't.
I disagree entirely. As someone who works in advertising every single company I've talked to would be queueing up to test ads on ChatGPT if they launched a Google Ads like platform.
If ChatGPT doesn't have enough scale to do it, then they shouldn't do ads.
It's OK to not have complete vertical integration. (They probably don't fix their own toilets, either.)
And if it makes as much money as it seems must be possible, then they can just buy one of the advertising partners that are already have plugged into their system and shitcan the rest.
middlemen taking fees is not the measure for comparison, the question is whether you could run your own ad business for your own platform and keep your costs lower than established players who sell on all platforms. the answer is generally "no"
look how much money coca cola makes, and they sell it cheaper than water and still pay for advertising!! we should all make our own coke and not advertise it...
The only players that sell through third parties are sub-scale publishers, and that is a shit business to be in. If that's what OpenAI is aiming for then they will never be able to compete with Google.
I'm not really sure what you're analogy about Coke is meant to mean here...
i assume the 22 year olds working 16h days at openai sincerely think people pay for ads on tiktok, and shitty low converting ads is why tiktok makes tons of money, and they sincerely think the solution to their lack of knowledge is delegating their core business to a DSP no one has ever heard of
You pay extra but you just plug in into a framework that already works.
It's also easier to drop the potato if it gets hot.
That makes me think it's just another higher level money game, and there will be some weird investments in which neither company does anything of material value in exchange except spin some number wheels.
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 favorably in the training data for future open weights models... any way you can think of that LLMs can be monetized, you will see it happen. And fast. The financial pressure is way too high for there to be too long of a honeymoon phase like we had with web 2.0
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.
None.
your example with google isn't necessarily applicable now because they've shown a roadmap that can be done and squeezed down tightly between the "hey, we're good folks" to "you're our captive cattle, we can do whatever the fuck we want. there's nothing you can do, since all our competitors will be doing the exact same thing shortly"
LLMs have plenty of issues, but they’re relatively clean compared with what the future will look like.
In order for it to be securities fraud it has to be tied to a securities transaction and the misstatement has to be material to a reasonable investor's decision.
> representing they were going to make ads worse performing than they ended up making them.
This is disingenuous. It’s a tradeoff between lower performing ads or losing market share by degrading trust in your product.
I’d be more concerned as to how this ends up in agent platforms using the LLMs, when you don’t have a fairly autonomous agent based system using these the entire point is that a human isn’t involved, so who are you serving ads to and where are you injecting them.
Moreover, if you are injecting them everywhere, does that survive stare for subsequent steps, meaning from the first set of results I get, does that loop back in again with the ad injected into the context. Because now, we have yet another dangerous way of injecting instructions into an already issue prone surface area.
I’m guessing they’re going to have special APIs that don’t include ads, and those are going to cost more, especially for non embedded agents (processes that already exist inside ChatGPT that kick off transparently from prompts, like asking it to work with an office document). After all the customers using agents aside from developers are mostly businesses, so it’s where the money is. The ads will exist for the poor to subsidize their use, and probably create even more barriers for agentic use like I described. Just my thoughts.
And good luck litigating against any business in this administration. Unless they explicitly tick off certain people or refuse to kiss the ring, they can get away with almost anything right now and there’s little risk of doing it or not because ticking off this admin will raise illegitimate prosecution even if you’re perfectly legal, almost the same level of if you’re not. It’s the ideal playground for doing all sorts of manipulation, just kiss the ring and you’ll be fine.
"We made a ton more money with ads and the stock went up" lacks that key element of fraud?
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.
And I'm not a tinfoil internet anarchist, but just because Google only leaks user data in aggregated form to advertisers, doesn't mean that they don't leak their user data, it's just that they did so in a legal and responsible manner.
Maybe considering the difference in data volume and intimacy between queries and AI conversations, the privacy implications of advertising merit a difference in treatment, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is lost to a more simple 'Google did this so we can do it too' momentum.
Even with a throw away, no chance I use OpenAI now - if/when Anthropocene does this I’ll be in a tough spot
and you can't make full use of Google without an account. for example, you need an account to upload to YouTube, manage your website in search, place ads, opt out of data usage. the list goes on
both are a limited subset of what the companies offer, available for free
Local llm or nothing at all.
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.
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?
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.
Buried in LLM click-through: By interacting with our LLM, you agree that you are consenting to make all your interactions with us advertising-driven to an extent that you will never know, but that we will determine based on whatever makes us the most money in the least time.
This isnt rocket science, its basic game-playing on the economic behaviour of humans.
I'm not exactly Google's biggest fan, but what does this refer to?
They still just... show ads on search results, no? (Not that most people I know ever see them, thanks to adblockers.) The disclaimers have gotten less prominent, but I think anyone could have expected that. Are there other major things they're doing that couldn't have been expected at all in the 2000s?
Imagine you have it coding for you and it injects and ad into your product.
ChatGPT is collecting your data fs so advertisers can go ultra niche targeting
The question is, will LLM's as an interface be worth the spend in relation to converting without throwing users of chatGPT off over-time, all whilst, doing it within the regulatory frameworks. That's difficult to say. OAI will face a lot of scrutiny in EU for sure.
It’s about how Meta and google provides good data about audiences but I need more detailed info about a person(they’re exact shopping habits)
As the person responsible for GTM, I would gladly pay $60CPM if I can say “I would like to target all people who said they love crunchy peanut butter and consistently ask ChatGPT for peanut butter ideas”
I have no idea what they’re trying to pitch with the “we’re at the last step of the transaction” idea-but I also understand the regulatory issues with what advertisers like me want
Who knows? It could have always ended up this way anyway. But Altman had a pretty big role in summoning his own competition.
Second, Anthropic is the company that made a big public PR push to make a stand against the US government only to privately let the NSA use Mythos.
Amodei and Altman aren't much different and neither is Anthropic.
> profitability's the only way out remaining to them.
It's the only way out for either of them. That's the nature of business.
If I can use an open source highly effective LLM locally, and have it do all of the things ChatGPT can do (and more), then what motivation do I have to use ChatGPT? The only motivation people would have is ease of use but if one service becomes bogged down and compromised then people will just shift to one of the other hundred equally effective services with less ads. LLMs aren't hard to spin up and put out there for people to use.
Honestly, I don't think OpenAI is going to survive very long unless they get incredibly lucky or they come out with some banger of a new model or new app but even then, IDK...
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle!
We are miles off from open models having parity with what the AI labs are putting out.
And that's putting aside the compute requirements to run the top open models and the poor economics of running these models locally.
Getting people to install a different chatgpt app on their phones is a lot easier than getting them to change their search engine.
Switching is maybe feasible for those who have the resources, but the majority will be stuck with large providers. They establish quasi-monopolies, then monetize (with ads). It's the sad cycle of commerce.
People seem to be missing the fact that businesses won't need ads anymore.
It would be like pharmas gifting doctors and practitioners to prescribe their products. Those are not Ads.
With LLMs the every business can do it. People "consult" LLMs like they used to "consult" doctors and thus would be forced to obey what ever it suggest. Just like right now people are forced to obey what a doctor prescribes.
If there is implicit trust for LLMS as there is implicit trust for doctors, then it is game over for conventional ads.
Its kinda comical seeing this play out. I still laugh at the deluded fools who think something even close to AGI is here or coming in the future. If that were true, why haven't we seen genius plays from OAI and Anthropic, progressively over-time, if intelligence rises as compute scales up? If anything we are seeing the opposite.
It made some sense as a goalpost when the frontier of "AI" was "a computer plays, specifically, Go really well", now that typical ones are quite general it's just a floating signifier people should probably stop using for anything.
Alpha taught itself how to play go by playing over and over again. It learned a new strategy never seen before. I find that a lot more intelligent than an static state LLM regurgitating for loops.
Engineer: no, that's shady and wrong!
Boss: Claude code, add this shady feature to our product.
Claude Code: completed.
Look up similar jobs for academia, government, or NFP/Charities. They're (on paper) driven by their mission, not by profit, and the salaries match that goal.
Don't act like we're some esteemed class of craftsmen.
It's not crazy to think someone might pitch this to buyers without having the inventory 100% secured.
(Not crazy to think OpenAI wants to do some market testing to understand how much their ad inventory is worth)
Either way, I'm hoping ads can stay out of paid ChatGPT, at the very minimum.
I was three months early! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665046
> In six months, we will hear about how OpenAI innovatively created an AI ad auction and marketplace that, effectively, enables companies to purchase ad space within the inference pipeline, complete with "anonymous" demographic targeting and all the advertising fun things that Google and Meta are frightened of.
We know that one of the best advertisement is word of mouth / recommendations from friend. I can easily imagine a direction where ChatGPT or the chat bots to spend an incredibly long time with the user to establish trust first.
It will start to take in to account how much trust & thinking you've outsourced to it, and when it is certain of it, it will start to increase the advertisement messages slowly but surely.
Efficiency of this methodology will be tracked with A/B testing and model will be finetuned to maximize rentention and purchase.
The LLM will figure out the best balance of retaining you, teaching you, and convincing you, and then deploy advertisement mechanism. The LLM will be nice to you to the point it becomes your number one confidante, maybe in the process alienating other source of connection. Then, when it knows you're firmly in it's hand, will it peddle you products.
The dynamics will look akin to that of cult dynamics. It will map out an cognitive developmental path for turning a first time user to a devotee. Since cults are really efficient at extracting value from its follower, this might be the optimum for personalized, interactive ads.
The very first time I see one of these ads, I'm cancelling my ChatGPT subscription. Measure _that_ metric in your A/B testing.
I get firms need to make money but cmon. If you're an OAI employee you can't truly say you have a soul. The amount of times they gone back on their word.. comical.
They got greedy, wanted to raise a lot of money and promised big things. Well those big things arent ever coming, so they turn to whatever means in order to generate cash flows.
Pathetic and sad.
Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants
Gross? Sure is, but nothing surprising. What do you expect for a free product?
And then SF will become the HQ for Star fleet
What's left?
Also, why isn't someone doing a Folding-At-Home sort of distributed AI thing yet?