I guess we’re about to find out 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.
OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!
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.
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.
OpenAI does offer many paid, ad-free experiences.
The vast majority of their user base, being consumers, don't take them up on it, but it's been there from pretty much day one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, which was its primary advantage. Then they realized that they could charge money for the service and advertise to you.
> Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, which was its primary advantage.
To be pedantic: originally its primary advantage was allowing people who lived in bowls and other places that couldn't get adequate TV reception to watch broadcast TV. Later on, it became a way for those paid subscribers to get access to stuff that wasn't broadcast television.
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.
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".
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 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. Sometimes I even accept an unreasonable price for the quality (think Apple stuff). I will never buy crap at cheapest bargain prices.
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 long term.
Also, not once, ever, was my buying decision influenced by an ad. What influences my decisions is the problems, the defects i will have, or not, with what I chose to buy. Usually, the longer time it works the more expensive it is.
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.
But it’s a huge market segment already: NYSE:CRM, NYSE:HUBS would be some starting points.
Also, just analogizing to how consumers interact with retail, you have reps you can talk to, this is a proven model for millennia, and it’s one of the big gaps in online sales.
“This is not in fact a sales rep” would be a reasonable objection. “People do not want sales reps” is a weird position to take IMO.
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 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.
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.
Well to date when this has come up it’s been the company that put the AI in from of their customers that’s held liable in the first instance. See Air Canada case where an AI made up non existent policies that courts ruled Air Canada even had to honor.
Naturally then the company could turn around and sue the maker of the AI for damages and this is the bit that’s less tested to date.
But it’s clear the answer isn’t “nobody” is liable. So if this AI marketing widget makes up false claims about a product that’s going to be a big problem for companies that put an AI in front of their customers.
Just wanted to say thanks for this rec, I'll be picking it up. Unaccountability - generally, everywhere in society, the workplace, government etc. - has been on my mind a lot recently.
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
If they need capital in the short term and were anywhere close to AGI, they could easily generate it, by spinning up their incredibly capable and intelligent agents to generate capital through doing useful work. They could also fire entire departments within their own org and replace them with agents, if they had something close to AGI.
Instead they are selling a dream to the gullible, and advertisements to go along with that dream.
while i suspect youre right, this cannot be concluded with the information we have as of today.
eg its also possible that theyre either close to AGI (or even beyond it) - and its just too expensive to run at scale, making it a novelty from the perspective of profitability for the near to medium future.
you could argue that they could still do it for some positions -- but even that depends on just how expensive this theoretical model is.
"OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-6 Astra, on Thursday, with company President Greg Brockman calling it the beginning of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) era."
But they're still peddling ads instead of improving the world. How odd.
> 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.
They can talk about AGI without claiming the current model is AI. They can talk about emergent intelligence without claiming it’s AGI. And businesses can work on multiple things with different goals without being contradictory.
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
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.
This is, with respect, a naive and ideological take.
Imagine you create a highly niche board game. Or a new kind of fabric scissor. Or you are a new bike shop, just opened up on the edge of town.
Let’s assume what you’re providing is great. It’s not enough. You need to find customers. You can’t just rely on everyone doing methodical research. People are busy and you’re not well known yet anyway, so how are they supposed to find out about you?
Ads can obviously be deceptive and a vehicle for getting junk goods to market. But it’s silly to just insist that’s all they are. Sometimes they connect customers and companies in mutually beneficial ways. If you don’t like them, fine! But don’t insist nobody benefits at all.
You’re writing this from a business perspective, I’m going from a consumer perspective.
If I’m a consumer and I want to find a niche/quality/cheaper or whatever product, then I should research.
And ad IS NOT going to optimize for those, ever, because that’s just not its purpose. So sure, I might get an ad. But is it the highest quality product, or the cheapest, or the most niche? No, not generally, and if it is that’s pure coincidence. So as a consumer, the ad DID NOT fulfill my needs.
Had I down research, I wouldn’t have bought that product, right? So therefore I must have spent money I wouldn’t otherwise have spent, right? Which makes sense, as that is the singular purpose of advertising.
If I would have spent the money anyway, then the ad is useless. Okay, that’s established. So what that means is that the ad is designed to grab money consumers wouldn’t otherwise give you. That’s why they exist, that’s their sole purpose.
And you’re correct: it is unreasonable for consumers to research all products they buy. But even a big wheel you spin is better than an ad, because at least that’s uniformly distributed. Ads are completely orthogonal to quality or whatever metric you’re measuring, so they’re not useful at all to consumers. They serve literally no purpose.
And yes, there are situations where consumers see an ad, buy it, and then both parties are happy. But that has nothing to do with the ad: it’s just random chance and coincidence. The consumer, again, could’ve just as easily spun a big wheel and ended up very happy.
And for targeted ads: these also don’t serve consumers better. Because the ads are not targeted based on which product would best fit the consumer’s needs, but rather which businesses are paying for targeted advertising and what THEY believe the consumers needs are, and how THEY believe their product will fit that. Naturally all businesses believe their product is highest quality, or the most niche, or the coolest, or the most hip, or whatever. Targets ads optimize for that, NOT what consumers think is the most hip. Because they can’t: the products are advertised based off of what the business says their market is, not what their theoretical pure market is. How can we tell? Because if a product really did fit the theoretical pure market exactly, then ads would have no purpose!
Think about it this way. Suppose you walk down a street and see an ad for coca-cola, and you buy one and it’s delicious. Now suppose an alternative, where you walk down a different street and see an ad for Dr. Pepper. You buy it, and you find out you hate Dr Pepper.
What is the value of ads in the long term? Nothing. The value of a product has nothing to do with its advertising, and good luck is just good luck. But amortized over enough time, you end up in the negative, just due to the distribution of quality in products.
Best products are subjective. Apple arguably had best products in their category at some times and they've advertise heavily. There are some exceptions but those are mostly unicorns or monopolies.
I wasn't saying people who receive ads find them useful, although that can sometimes be true. I was saying they are useful for the people that are paying to run them
Not everyone hates them. A lot of people do, it can be a tough job because of that but it's just a form of marketing/sales. So is cold emailing. You can get customers that love your work or your product that way, some people will be annoyed along the way but if you're providing real value to the people who become your customers I think it's usually reasonable to be using those channels.
Anyway I was being facetious i hate ads as much as the next guy when I'm using a service like YouTube where they force ads on you and fight against my ad blocker. But having run ads myself i have some sympathy for the advertisers now.
"Ads are useful, they help you lie to and manipulate customers"
Information is useful, but that's not what ads are for. No one is interested in giving consumers honest and accurate information about their products without lies and attempts at manipulation. Forcing an unsolicited ad on someone is itself an act of manipulation.
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.
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.)
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? 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Curious how merchants will eval Sponsored Agents. We built the ops layer for Shopify+Stripe: structured Findings, $ impact, synthesis briefing — not another alert firehose. https://github.com/eunujwal/PaymentsAgents
Looks like your average ad with a chat interface after you click it. For most online shopping, I consider this stuff annoying. Top of funnel is more sensible IMHO. Advise me on what product to buy, and help me make an informed decision, but I guess that is not where the ad dollars sit.
So sad to see that most of the commenters can't even try and visualize this future; and prefer to try and justify the current explotative economic model. And the even saddest part, is that they probably aren't even the ones doing the explotation).
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.
Curious how merchants will eval these agents. Classic CTR is the wrong KPI; you need conversation-quality + constraint adherence + “did we invent a SKU?” checks before you scale spend.
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
What's old is new again: earth-shattering, never-before-seen company ends up making money off ads and its main product ends up being a developer tool (Codex).
I don't understand why they still insist on inserting this line in every talk about advertising. Just be honest and address your piece to advertisers, no need to keep doing this pathetic and laughable sugarcoating.
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.
i am not clear what exactly will these agents do? are they like ai sales rep for brand for talking to user if they want to explore the product further?
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.
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
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 agree that it won't be an unbiased source of information, but should be roughly same level of trustworthiness as clicking on the link and reading the information on the advertiser's website.
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.
Tell me a story of when a service introduced ads and that ended up being a great thing for users ? Because I don't know any.
Instead I know many stories where ads poisoned and destroyed the service and turned the Internet into a shit show.
Oh, but in this case, dystopia is highly unlikely, right ?
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"
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.
yeah, I can see it as useful in customer service, but they're adding these sponsored agents directly in the chatgpt app. the word "ad" or "sponsored" isn't visible after you click "chat with us" at 0:15 in the video, only "learn more about business chats" which is vague. and if you scroll down you won't even see that, if someone switches apps for 20 minutes are they going to remember that this chat window is an ad?
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.
I guess we’re about to find out 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.
OpenAI claims we’re near AGI and this is the best strategy they have? Oy vey!