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This is gross

It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close

Let the enshitification begin, I guess

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Since they are served as distinct events then I would think they should be easy to block.

Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.

Can't wait for "watch this ad for 90s to use xxhigh on your next prompt!"
Remember that ads are the "last resort" for OpenAI, and they're doing this despite the fact that it's "uniquely unsettling", according to Sam.

Was he lying, or has OpenAI given up hope that this train wreck works economically without enshittification? Neither option is good, but I don't really see a third.

I see OpenAI making a significantly larger amount from defense contracts than from advertisements pumped into chats. So I wonder whose bright idea it was to create a public perception risk.
I'd always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content.
I don't get what's wrong with charging for your product. Like get rid of the free tier and make a small tier with an easy to serve model for like 5 bucks. Is it still the DAU rage of the 2010ss that's driving burning money?
The ads are in the free tier and the new ad-supported $8/month plan.

Every time this comes up there are comments assuming that ads are being injected into the normal plans, but these are for the free tier and the new Go plan which warns you that it includes ads when you sign up.

Really well written, technical post. Good read.
Not to me they don’t, cause I canceled my account and stopped using their products when they made the announcement.
It is one of the eternal lessons; All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads. At least until we ban pixels / 3rd party tracking.
So news about OpenAI demise is real. They can’t sustain themselves without ads.
I've seen chatgpt suggest me more amazon products lately
These are the less worrying kind of ads in our future.

Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages, what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model?

We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.

Less than two years ago, Sam Altman said

> I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services, but if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.

So, is this OpenAI announcing they're strapped for cash?

Well, they want to give everyone access for free. That's very explicitly their mission.

We don't seem to have invented a way of doing that which isn't ads.

Hence, every other online platform.

...Except this one, which is funded by... benevolence? :) Come to think of it, Archive.org and Wikipedia also seem to have found a way.

I don't think that model scales to "free LLM for everyone" though, at least not for another decade or two.

Interesting, no bidding flow entirely first party and contextual.
I was looking to see if BZR referred to a 3rd party ad network. I didn't find anything, but apparently someone has replicated OAI's system and you can run insert it into your own LLM.

GH: system32miro/ai-ads-engine

The schema is literally named single_advertiser_ad_unit. The single_ prefix is doing all the foreshadowing you need.