RIP their stock price once that’s live

Probably can make a ton of money shorting that

Well, better hope Anthropic isn’t in on it.

This isn't a leak or a surprise.

This already happened a while ago with specific shopping queries.

Wow, ads and smut in the same month? Cory Doctorow will have to invent a new term for this. Wait, he did 3 years ago, we can reuse it.

This outcome was obvious. If you really let yourself rely on an LLM, it will steer you towards what its owners want; products and services provided by advertisers, the "right" social and moral values, etc. It will even "accidentally" steer you towards its own inflections and ways of thinking. This is one isn't overtly malicious, but is still insidious. Do these companies get to standardize thinking and speaking just so they can get ahead of a technology race?

Not at all surprising. Google, Meta and many others have made billions selling an ads - I’m sure OpenAI wants a piece of that pie.

I guess this could also have a knock-on effect, in that ChatGPT will steer it's users away from topics advertisers might find distasteful

Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue

Free, and open source models. Now and forever.

It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money. It will be interesting though how much the response of the LLM will be adapted. At least legally advertisement need to be marked for users. So either the response of an LLM will be extended with ad content or replaced by ad content.

- ~1 billion users in just 3 years

- Extremely personal data on users

- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products

- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)

- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable

I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.

I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.

All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.

Can you imagine how annoying ads in the voice interface would look like? Ugh

"that could redefine the web economy" I don't think that ads in ChatGPT are that disruptive, it's just another channel. I think ChatGPT apps are an order magnitude more game changing, as they are not a new markting channel but a new distribution channel for software. Your next ad will still be an ad, but your next SaaS might be a ChatGPT App.

If you're not paying for a product (the full price), then you are the product.

If you're not paying for the product, and you aren't the product, you're in the start-up phase and just eating the bait.