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I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?
Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.

I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.

Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.

Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.

Open models still need to run somewhere. If that's not your machine, expect to pay or watch some ads.
Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.
I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...
Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
Can’t wait to dropship my cat lover shirts from China using chatgpt ads.

It’s like 2015 facebook again.

Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
I find this -- standard ads -- preferable to insinuating the same thing in the ChatGPT content itself. Although of course they'll do both.
>with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience

Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.

I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.

Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.

This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".

Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.

Yeah, I don't mind these ads, just as I didn't mind ads on Google when they first came out. But once you have ads, there's huge monetary pressure to make them more effective over time, which inevitably ends in ads that pretend to be organic content.
Moreover, OpenAI already doesn't have the best reputation for maintaining ideals over doing the convenient and profitable thing
Funny how none of their testimonials/case studies state any ROI. I'd guess it's because it isn't too strong at this point.

But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.

I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.

In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?

And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?

I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?

Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.

LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?

"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." - Sam Altman