Sure Sam Altman and his $200/mo subscribers won’t see them, but it was clear they were coming for free users.
Yet. Amazon Prime has ads despite it being a paid service.
> In a science fiction story, if you invented a superintelligent robot and asked it how to make money, it might come up with cool never-before-seen ideas, or at least massive fun market manipulation. But in real life, if you train a large language model on the internet and ask it how to make money, it will say “advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn.” That’s the lesson the internet teaches!
But I think it makes a lot of sense for very popular consumer products. In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT etc exist for free, but with ads, rather than not exist at all. Preferably with an option to pay and remove ads
Nowadays I'm happy to pay for Youtube premium or LLM, but back during my student days I could not really afford it - and I'm glad there was a free tier (with ads)
If they're not labeled, or are shown even to paying users, I think that's a problem.
Also, everyone gets a free pony.
It's unfortunate because user experience was a core differentiating advantage for Apple that got them to where they are now.
Especially if it's LLM-generated to fit with the context, the message will slip right into the mind. Then a little "(Sponsored)" at the bottom after you've already consumed the ad.
This is a bit like how ads are presented on X, they look like regular posts or replies but they usually feel off topic and you're thinking "huh, this doesn't fit the discussion". But LLMs will allow much more seamless and sneaky ads.
Btw, the end game is probably having ads in the llm context .... or directly in the llm training set.
Why would advertisers prefer people without money to people with money?
People who do not pay for ChatGPT often have money and prefer not to pay for for a subscription for several reasons including, but not exclusively: 1) They don't use ChatGPT often enough to justify it 2) They use alternatives primarily (a subset of #1) 3) They choose to spend their money on other things
I just canceled my $200/month GPT-Pro subscription. 5.2-Pro is in decline -- it has been getting noticeably worse at a steady rate since introduction. At this point, it's not appreciably better for most queries than Claude 4.5 Opus, and Opus is roughly 10x faster.
The smoking gun is the time. If I ask it a question that's subtle in "thinking" mode and it starts replying in a few seconds, the answer will probably be trash. I'm almost sure they degrade the models over time.
Could it be that they are trying to save traffic?
My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.
By the way don't sleep on this detail:
> The banner ads will appear in the coming weeks for logged-in users of the free version of ChatGPT *as well as the new $8 per month ChatGPT Go plan*
Even if you pay for the product, you're still the product. If we don't own our software, our software will own us.
Ideally, they’ll introduce a whole new level of targeting relevance, which will be good for both advertisers and prospects.
Or to put it another way, I'll be interested to see how long before the ads become inseparable from the actual content of the response.
simmerup•54m ago