The online ad business is built around the exact opposite business model. Entities pay to advertise products in exchange for leads.
Personally, I'll either spin up my own LLM or go back to life without them before I let ChatGPT advertise to me.
> OAI-SearchBot is for search. OAI-SearchBot is used to link to and surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features. It is not used to crawl content to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. Learn more (opens in a new window).
Correction: they're not their ads, but they're generating recommendations based on scraped web content which will inevitably be polluted with affiliate spam, astroturfing and other black hat marketing bullshit. They've actually found a way to run ads and not even get paid for it.
Case in point, I just asked ChatGPT for the best noise cancelling headphones under $200 (their example from the OP) and it cited multiple blatantly LLM generated affiliate blogspam sites. Doesn't really inspire confidence.
Doesn't this imply that they're paid via referral bonus?
Think of it as marketing for the sending site. It gets the attention of the receiving site.
OpenAI is trying to build a product that’s sticky which keeps people locked in. Right now they don’t have any moat and stickiness. They are trying social network to create the lock-in effect.
My prediction is that they have a year till all major mobile phones have competent, native AI baked in so they are afraid of losing market share and might want to make hay while the sun is still shining.
Most ChatGPT sessions I have these days include ChatGPT reminding me or referencing something that I only shared with it days or weeks earlier in previous chats. So far it does increase quality of the chats, although not valuable enough (yet) to prevent me from using a different model.
Because the first thing you have to do to surface your products on ChatGPT is opt your site into the scraper.
- Open-Source models released this year are comparable with commercial ones from ChatGPT
- NVIDIA to release 3k USD/EUR tiny AI-box that can run those beefy models for your own use cases very fast
While majority of people will be fine with "ai-ligh"t on their phones, enthusiasts can just invest 3k EUR/USD one time and run their own private, personalized, heavy and maybe most importantly uncensured AI using open source models.
Marketers for small ecommerce businesses have been wondering for years how they’re going to upload merchant data to LLMs.
This is their first moment of clarity.
OpenAI is building their own Google Merchant Center.
By constantly being in the headlines, they've given competitors lots of room to catch up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769936#43770100
I even mentioned "Sam" by name.. either I am the wisest person on this planet (nope I am most absolutely definitely not), or Sam is easy to read on the department of "I got ethics.. yeah.. I do.. shut up or I will sue you because I'm a good person!!!"
Where money can be made, money will be made. I have been gladly spending that $20+ per month, but if ads ..sorry.. "suggestions" start rolling in I'll take my $20 and give it to someone else.
I'm so glad that OpenAI is spending billions of dollars boiling the oceans to solve the most vexing problem facing humanity.
Eventually Ecommerce brands will pay OpenAI to display more fields/include more product data.
The chat model will probably tell users something like, “here’s all of the products from your search, unbiased as usual!”
BUT some of those products will have tags that encourage clicks and conversions:
- “on sale now!” - “4.8/5 reviews” - “inventory in your size”
Who really loses here? I think this an acceptable advertising model for LLMs.
There's a customer. They have a need. The go to the tool (i.e., search or AI) looking for answers. Note: They are a customer of the tool. That is, the tool, in order to retain the customer wants to keep that customer happy.
In any case, knowing that's the relationship, the tool is very mindful of any suggestions. It doesn't want to send its customer to some BS site, have its customer get pissed off and then next time use a different tool. The tool could do pay-to-play but that endangers the relationship with the customer.
Ultimately the tools' number #1 question is: "Can I trust this site I'm going to suggest with my customer?" and "If I suggest this site to my customer will it help or hurt my relationship with my customer?"
Again, the tool could do a pay-to-play model but that likely endangers the relationship with the customer.
I regularly use ChatGPT for product advice. The other day I was replacing a wireless router, and I needed a WiFi 6 vs 6n vs 7 vs mesh vs not-mesh breakdown. It was great to have the AI explain all that, and it would recommend products, but there were no pictures, and no links, and definitely no price comparisons.
So I had to copy and paste product names from my GPT chat app into google, and then click around a bit, and repeat across 3 or 4 products. And then remember all that. I have no objections with ChatGPT showing me products I've asked about, and doing a price compare, and linking me. And I don't even have a problem with them wrapping those links in affiliate links if they want to.
As long as the suggestions they give aren't based on who pays them the most money then I think it's a value add.
That’s exactly what this announcement is leading up to. OpenAI is copying everything Google does - search, ads, IDE
temp0826•9mo ago
reaperducer•9mo ago
I think it was the New York Times that showed a sample of how they do it. It looks a lot like a hybrid of prompt hacking and old fashioned Bobby Tables mischief.