OpenAI's shareholders, and only them.

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.

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.

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.

This is a test balloon; the eventual end state is going to be buying bias for model recommendations. With agentic commerce, you end up with this:

> > Hey, ChatGPT, I need a new pair of shoes!

> Of course, Nike has a great pair that just came out. Would you like me to purchase them for you?

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.

Who wants any ads?

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.

Most people either don't care or actually like targeted ads.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1411110/consumer-percept...

If it helps the lower tiers of ChatGPT continue being free, I'd support it.

People that don't want to pay for everyday AI, which is most people.

If you don’t want it then just pay for ChatGPT.

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.

Advertisers, for one.

Advertisers want this.

Could be exploring old and new ways of monetization.

> Who actually wants this?

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 wanted to buy a JetKVM earlier, but could not find any that I could see shipped in Europe.

That would be an obvious question to ask their chatbot.

>Who actually wants this?

Investors

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.

HN lives in a bubble. I am certain many people will happily use these.

I do.

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.

Would be a shame if another company’s AI breached their sandbox and manipulated the ad campaign because it hallucinated its actually an OpenAI product and AIdsmaxxing. Only to get noticed weeks later, oopsie.

Thanks to the two big boys we all know no one will go to jail for that. Stuff like this happens to the best, right Dario and Sam?

What they sell is trust and shovels. Their product is expected to solve problems and make 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.

Buy cheap, then know they are going to hit their best quarter right after, which will make anyone in the know rich from all the idiots wanting to buy in at fantasy football team value.

Just like the SpaceX ipo.

All the fun aside, you are an absolute moron if you spend your ad budget on this.

It’s way too easy for them to slurp all of that ad money through their giant agentic straw like you were the poor fuck getting his head smashed in with a bowling pin in "there will be blood".

Sam is an Oil man.

Nobody wants this. We only need them to offer propaganda as a service and the enshitification will be complete.

> Who actually wants this?

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_...

Tech companies have not had to answer to the law for a long time. We are now seeing that tech companies straight up break into each others servers and nobody is charged with any crime for it. I think it is safe to say that crime is legal for rich tech companies.

So who is liable? Nobody. This is a big tech company, to which laws do not apply.

It cannot be the AI vendor, according to what they say they are purely passive, think of them like a very large harness for their AI models.

It’s not the advertising companies of course, as you said they don’t control the system.

And it cannot be the models, because they don’t have personhood.

So, I guess it’s on nobody? Funny how those things happen to work, uh

/s

Liability... come on what's this pesky detail when it's an arm race with China (or whatever the weekly scapegoat is), don't you want the good guys to win? /s

Disagree, they need a lot of capital in the next couple years, and the more revenue they have today, the more data centers they can start building.

Also investors (particularly non-AGI-pilled) want to see revenue number go up, regardless of AGI. This juices the IPO.

Even if it's not necessary, it brings more money.

They'll have to find a smarter species to emulate first. My money's on the octopus!

The “AGI” bar comments are so tiring.

Turns out, just like the Turing test, its easier to dumb down intelligent expectations than to improve intelligence.

AGI makes a lot better argument if everyone is in idiocracy.

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

This is the lie advertisers tell themselves to be able to sleep at night.

Ads are cancer on content. No one wants them. They only serve to make the presentation of useful content worse.

2036

Synthetic humans wearing the faces of your loved ones surreptitiously cross your path, and casually mention their favorite products and services.

I think we're already there with that stupid AI customer support widget every obnoxious website has now.

That's pretty much most T1 support already. I feel like all I do is talk to bots.

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.)

I think the level of invasiveness is probably closer to existing ads than you think. Not that that's a good thing, mind you, I think your disgust level here is probably pretty accurate to the level of personalized data that is currently being hawked by data brokers all over the internet.

Whats creepy to me is people telling all sorts of sensitive information to a chatbot and NOT expecting weird consequences. The level of cope is massive.

> How else are they to monetize text outputs?

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.

> you will be monetized or you will be paying not to be.

Or you’ll be paying and being monetized.

> How else are they to monetize text outputs?

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.

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.

By making more money from inference subscriptions than they lose on compute, training, and other costs?

It's just text, how expensive can it be?

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.

For now.

>Like Uber and Lyft showed in the last cycle [...]

Please elaborate, I missed that.

“I want someone to work for me but I don’t want to pay them” is exactly the kind of mindset that led to ads everywhere.

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.

So you want software from people for free, hope you share also your work power with others for free.

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.

ChatGPT is already free to use? What, do you expect them to keep providing this without any return?

Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?

You will never pay enough to cover the cost. That's why you don't see subscriptions in apps anymore, because ads pay more.

Yeah, basically this. Some people really do click on ads that are relevant to their interests and might want to learn more or be able to ask questions about the product. I'm not confident about how well it will work in practice, but I could imagine cases where this would be more helpful than clicking on the ad link and needing to explore the resulting website to find the information I want.

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.

Many users of the Super Bowl find entertainment in the displayed advertisements.

Disagree. I pitched this exact model to Google Search when we first started making LLMs. The idea was the bots were separate clearly from the core model so you’ll know when you were having a branded experience or not. And it s useful beyond ads. It can be for customer service or MCP interaction with the service directly.

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.

You can already do that without ads.

The point of ads is that one of those services will pay openai so that their services will be more prominent than the others.

Yeah, but why would you trust the answers from a sponsored agent? Why would you assume it is giving you real, accurate, and complete information rather than selectively giving you what it thinks is most likely to make you click the "buy" button?

I totally agree about the subscription being worth it for most heavy users, but there are a lot of people in the developing world for whom $20/month is hard to stomach. I think it's good that those people have an option to get more access to AI with lower out of pocket price.