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>Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads.

For now, or for ever?

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so perfectly personalized ads? the CPM on this is probably wild (for openai).
I Am Shocked, I Am Shocked, Well Not That Shocked.
> What will always remain true: ChatGPT’s answers remain independent and unbiased, conversations stay private, and people keep meaningful control over their experience.

Translation: They will very slowly abandon their 'principles', just like they did with the moment they took investment from Microsoft and the VCs.

This is how ChatGPT gets destroyed and 'ensh*ttified' for everyone. The same people who jumped ship from Meta and destroyed Facebook, Instagram, and soon Threads are also the same people that are about apply the same recipe on to ChatGPT at OpenAI.

The researchers that were there pre-ChatGPT are now being replaced by opportunist grifters that will ruin the product overrun by ads once again. It would be no-different to Google Ads.

Now we need ad-blockers for LLMs to be in place "for the benefit of humanity".

Have to wonder if the IPO push for this year is genuine now
Its seemingly a hedge against not generating enough revenue to maintain existing investor trust / sustain operations in the future.
switching to gemini right now... this is insane! why should i pay openai to get unsolicited ads?!
Dont't be evil, etc... we've seen it all before. Eventually ads will be hidden in the answers, it's just a matter of time, enshittification ensues eventually.

God, how stupid do they think we are?

How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur?

I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?

> and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?

Their monetization plan is to have ad-free subscription options from $20 to $200/month and an API which charges by token.

These ads are for the free and new low-cost ad-subsidized tier that comes in below their existing $20/month plan.

Their valuation is dumb no matter what but you've got to think it's based off of the potential for B2B / gov revenue, not monetizing the consumer facing stuff directly.

Which is to say I feel like they're going to use ads on the consumer stuff just to stop bleeding out VC money as quickly, but nobody's deluded enough to think this is going to bring them much closer to profitability overall.

Ads are they only way to make a lot of money on the internet.
Indeed. What advertisers want is chatbot that works as a sales rep, and this is the sort of thing LLMs can be really really good at. Money talks.
Its like how even nuclear reactors still just boil water. Its kinda funny.

Whats the solar of monetization?

If take away ads as a "business model" then what happens to "Big Tech"

Castles made of sand...

> Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you.

I wonder if this is a don't-break-product-value thing, or just compliance (ads need to be clearly labeled, but OpenAI seems like it has the risk appetite to ignore that kind of thing).

Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.
As someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.
> more invasive

I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.

The ratchet can loosen! It should be easy to detect what is an ad and thus block it (or overlay some artwork over it or just blank it out).

Use ChatGPT for getting answers, and use Claude for detecting the ads in ChatGPT, or vice versa!

Oligarcy itself is a similar ratchet overall (The Iron Law of Oligarchy), and many of its moving parts similarly optimize. The problem is like Soylent Green; it's made of people.
Saddest part is that people mostly won't care. See also:

- Google

- Social media

- ad blockers still being relatively niche

While the general census will be largely negative, it good for advertisers, i guess.
"The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."
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I hate ads too but whats the outrage? Did people expect it to be free forever? Everything else has ads. youtube, instagram, x, google etc. etc.
I was at the bar when Claude's answer to this came on. One of my mates was absolutely confused as to what Claude was.

They assumed it was an an ad for a dating app or something. I had to explain it was an ad specifically targeted at maybe the 5% of people who work in software.

Honestly... I don't mind ads. For example, I make music as my main hobby. I actually enjoy getting advertisements for VSTs( virtual software instruments) and various pieces of gear.

I have no problem with Open AI showing relevant ads. Ain't nothing free

The ads in Google also started like this. (However, to my knowledge, there is no way I can pay Google to get the ads in my search removed)
Forget about that, the founders literally said word for word that advertising ruins search quality in their seminal paper. They became the exact thing they fore-warned about their competitors at the time.

Down-right joke really. The people who idolise them are incredibly delusional.

Try this in ChatGPT: "So ChatGPT is getting ads. The Google guys wrote _the_ paper explaining why ads in search are a bad idea, and Google set about demonstrating it. How can ChatGPT avoid the same fate with all the same incentives?"
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I have a question though, if they don't have access to chats but they find out the enchilada ad was performing the best, something like this can provide enough information to be used to know about peoples private chats. When someone clicks on an ad you collect a fingerprint, then add more ads and fingerprint more and get a stronger picture about the individuals private chats in chatgpt.

If I were a large donor to a state that was interested in increasing action against abortion, I could hypothetically start running ads targeting people looking to get an abortion with a service that either provides assistance or other means parallel to assistance. If I target that state chatgpt would automatically match my ads to those individuals and I'd have my data. I could increase my donations to target and cull whatever little options those people have left.

I wonder if OpenAI will be able to use their gen 2 user-observation-adaption platform to actually improve ads?

This could be one of those product afterthoughts that end up being the big company move, like when Apple did the Iphone and then added the AppStore afterwards.

EDIT: Downvotes. I see this is controversial. There are two major threads in the world today with AI. One is that this fascinating tech can keep you occupied in a corner, apps like generative.ai can automate out your work, you can go on holiday, heck you won't even need to work necessarily, just live on welfare and leave the business folks to their thing, that I've heard Musk and Zuckerberg talk to. And then there's the idea that the whole point of society is to figure out how to productively engage with each other, via jobs, that I see JD Vance is all about, and I fully agree with. In which case, the more important question about AI becomes 'How can it stimulate business between 3rd parties', as that will truly drive an economic revival. How AI can improve ads can then be seen to be more central.