Who didn’t see this coming? I swear, all we produce as a country is bullshit and ads to cover it up.
ChatGPT will start including advertisements beside answers for US users as OpenAI seeks a new revenue stream.
The ads will be tested first in ChatGPT for US users only, the company announced on Friday, after increasing speculation that the San Francisco firm would turn to a potential cashflow model on top of its current subscriptions.
The ads will start in the coming weeks and will be included above or below, rather than within, answers. Mock-ups circulated by the company show the ads in a tinted box. They will be served to adult users “when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation”, according to OpenAI’s announcement. Ads will not be shown to users under 18 and will not appear alongside answers related to sensitive topics such as health, mental health or politics. Users will be able to click to learn about why they received a particular ad, according to OpenAI.
Having watched the “wanna develop an app” episode from R&M, this is the end of openAI. Everyone hates ads and will say fuck this shit i’m out.
You can easily block these ads by never using the slop engine
Can’t wait for it to turn its latest travesty Suicide Goodnight Moon into an ad for rope.
This stuff’s made in New York City!
Cancelled my subscription when I pay for it like I always do. I will NOT be renewing this month.
They’re currently burning more than a billion USD each month, it’s fully understandable that they are trying to earn more money. I seriously doubt that ad revenue will even come close to what they need to financially survive.
Let’s hope so!
I can see it easily making that much money in ads. LLMs have been making people fall in love, superglueing the peperoni on pizzas, making mustard gas at home. The ads won’t be in the form of a banner or a pop up, but in the responses. Drive to target.
Surely things like product comparisons are a great target for ads. But still, the typical ad revenue per user is probably significantly lower than the cheapest ChatGPT subscription.
ChatGPT subscriptions are significantly cheaper than what they cost the company anyway.
I once accidentally made mustard gas at home trying to unclog a drain. I had bleach and ammonia on hand, and I ended up sleeping outside on the sofa on the porch of the main house after the hell I went through with my throat.
I have this scary vision where they somehow do a more or less successful IPO and gain 100 billion or more. Than this idiocy will never stop.
Good thing I don’t use it.
Good thing I’m not in US.
I used it for work to paraphrase individual grafs when doing rewrites of press releases so that I could avoid unintentional plagiarism (it’s sort of a grind where that can slip in). But I have no purpose for it now.
- doesn’t want to unintentionally plagiarize
- uses the plagiarism machine
It’s ok, AI made the decision to plagiarise, the user is completely off the hook!
I still did my own writing. It was just a way to be one step removed from wording of the source material. I checked carefully to make sure it hadn’t gone off on a fanciful excursion.
Surely the most obvious business model is blackmail of the users with the sensitive information they’ve handed over?
We all know it’s going to be bad. In fact, I expect hilarious results.
Ask for pizza recipes, get an ad for Elmer’s Glue.
I wonder if this is going to affect all those companies that have ChatGPT-powered customer agents.
It would be very funny to receive an ad for a competitor while trying to get help for something from the company that makes it.
They’re unaffected as they pay for the OpenAI API (there’s no free API) which is a separate product to ChatGPT. This change only affects ChatGPT, and I think only the free version.
LMAO. Good. Couldn’t be happier about it!
Lmao
As far as I know, this is only for the free version of ChatGPT. It costs a lot of money to run, and they’re still not profitable, so it makes sense that they want to monetize the free version. The other option is to completely shut down the free version and only have the paid one.
As far as I can tell, the paid one also loses then plenty of money (possibly more than the free one?)
I think you’re right - people using the paid ones want to get their money’s worth. Even on the expensive plans like Claude Code’s $100/month subscription, people often end up using the equivalent of thousands of dollars worth of API usage, which doesn’t even cover the full cost of providing the service.
organizations buying by the dozens is good for openai and it shows they can get cash flow vs free users that are only taking up resources.
it’s probably going to be like youtube
OpenAI has a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. LLMs cost a lot of compute. They’re burning through cash. Operating costs are more than double revenue. Their net operational losses are about $1 million USD every 40 minutes.
And somehow they’re trying to put half a trillion USD into building more datacentres to make even more advanced models, which will be even more compute intensive.
Meanwhile, as venture capital has been committed to a whole series of AI companies and data centres, venture capital is dying up. Nobody has gotten a payout yet, since there’s no path to profitability for any of these companies.
And it’s coming to a head this fall, when OpenAI needs to pay their suppliers for the expansion they’re building, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be able to raise enough more investment to cover their costs.
It doesn’t even take OpenAI failing, either. There’s so much debt (“leverage”) and circular cashflow going on in this space, between the AI companies, data centres, computer hardware manufacturers, and construction companies, that any one of them failing could cause cascading failures, like dominoes. Worse than the '08 financial crash, most likely.
So no. It’s not going to be like YouTube. YouTube is cheap to run, compared to LLMs.
And the worst part of it all: LLMs aren’t even very good! It creates an illusion of productivity, but it’s all bullshit, either doing a shitty job, or taking more time to prompt fondle than it would have taken to do the job by hand, or building up tech debt that’s going to make massive projects unmaintainable.
It has some use cases, sure. I use it almost daily, tbh. But only because someone else is footing the bill. It doesn’t produce nearly enough value to justify its costs.
Don’t kinkshame … some of us enjoy prompt fondling.
