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
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess we’re about to find out on 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.
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.
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.
People who want to use AI more but didn't want to pay. Which is probably most people. Even if they don't admit it, their preference will be revealed by not paying for the ad free version. Same as most other websites.
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.
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.
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 ling term.
Also, not once, ever, was my buying decision influenced by an ad. What influence my decisions is the problems, the defects i will have, or not, with i chose to buy. Usually, the longer time it works the more expensive it is.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am confident someone can let AI click all those ads at scale and run an army of chatbots fucking those companies metrics to make sure on top of unusable data, the companies doing the advertisement lose even more money to OpenAI, which will accelerate OpenAIs downfall as nobody is extracting any value out of this but OpenAI.
What they sell is trust: their product solves problems and makes 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadAGI 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.
This move tells us they don’t think they’re anywhere near AGI, directly contradicting their bombast and puffery on the subject.
Also investors (particularly non-AGI-pilled) want to see revenue number go up, regardless of AGI. This juices the IPO.
Synthetic humans wearing the faces of your loved ones surreptitiously cross your path, and casually mention their favorite products and services.
(Law on this goes all the way back to Carbolic Smoke Ball)
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.
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"
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.
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.
Or you’ll be paying and being monetized.
Here I foolishly thought that that was the job of ChatGPT itself.
Ads are cancer on content. No one wants them. They only serve to make the presentation of useful content worse.
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.
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 could be useful, but no one is interested in giving consumers accurate information about products.
Everyone hates them. Just like ads.
Additionally, there is no content that is made better by introducing ads. Ads do not improve any experience.
I guess we’re about to find out on 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.
Investors
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 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.
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.
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.
I do not want cheaper, I want quality at a reasonable price.
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 ling term.
Also, not once, ever, was my buying decision influenced by an ad. What influence my decisions is the problems, the defects i will have, or not, with i chose to buy. Usually, the longer time it works the more expensive it is.
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'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.
The point is do users want ads? Or more reasonably, should platforms offer a paid, ad-free, experience.
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?
That would be an obvious question to ask their chatbot.
> > Hey, ChatGPT, I need a new pair of shoes!
> Of course, Nike has a great pair that just came out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am confident someone can let AI click all those ads at scale and run an army of chatbots fucking those companies metrics to make sure on top of unusable data, the companies doing the advertisement lose even more money to OpenAI, which will accelerate OpenAIs downfall as nobody is extracting any value out of this but OpenAI.
What they sell is trust: their product solves problems and makes 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.
Or, now lets what the enshittification movement can do to this space.
Please elaborate, I missed that.
I think pushing back with cancellations is the only way forward.
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.
Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?
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.
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.
> Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu accounts will not have ads.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt
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?
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.)
What’s wrong with this choice ?