ChatGPT serves ads. Here's the full attribution loop

https://www.buchodi.com/how-chatgpt-serves-ads-heres-the-full-attribution-loop/

115•lmbbuchodi•1h ago

Comments

gxs•1h ago

This is gross

It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close

Let the enshitification begin, I guess

2ndorderthought•1h ago

In the past month local models have been ramping up in major way meanwhile the namesake providers have upped prices, went offline randomly, and started doing slimier and slimier things.

I really think the future is local compute. Or at least self hosted models.

SchemaLoad•1h ago

The hosted ones still have the advantage of being able to search the internet for live info rather than being limited to a knowledge cut off date.

darepublic•1h ago

Local ones that support tool use can do the same

gbear605•1h ago

I’m not sure why a model needs to be hosted in order to make network calls?

hansvm•1h ago

Is there a library of good tools for LLMs to call? I have to imagine the bot-detection avoidance mechanisms are a major engineering effort and not likely to work out of the box with a simple harness and random local LLM.

ossa-ma•1h ago

Even the hosted ones are blocked from searching certain sites, for example Claude is banned from searching Reddit:

`Error: "The following domains are not accessible to our user agent: ['reddit.com']."`

wyre•1h ago

Tavily, Exa, Firecrawl, Perplexity, and Linkup are all tools for agents to search the web.

I’ve been building a harness the past few months and supports them all out of the box with an API key.

goosejuice•25m ago

Kagi also has an API. People who hate ads are probably the same folk that should be paying for Kagi. That's the sane alternative world where companies respect their users.

eightysixfour•1h ago

You can do that locally too!

CSMastermind•1h ago

What's the rough equivalent of a local model? Are we talking GPT-4?

Terretta•1h ago

Depends on your VRAM or "unified" memory for how smart it is, and CPU/GPU for how quick it is.

128GB of RAM? Sure, the early to mid 4s releases, except maybe 4o. And on an M5 Max, about the same speed.

I wouldn't really bother under 64GB (meaning 32GB or less) except for entertainment value (chats, summaries, tasky read-only agent things).

kay_o•1h ago

GLM 5.1 and DeepSeek 4 are acceptable, but the cost of hardware and energy cost that depending on your use case you may as well purchase a Tokens. They get useless and stupid rapidilty if you quant enough to run on single 16-24GB GPU style.

2ndorderthought•51m ago

Qwen 3.6 which was released this month is a large but still smaller model. Supposedly it's at about sonnet level when configured correctly. It can be run on commodity hardware without purchasing a data center. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1so1533/qwen36_...

Then there are middle size ones which require multiple gpus which are like gpts latest flagships.

Then there is kimi 2.6 which is a monster that is beating opus in some benchmarks. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sr8p49/kimi_k2...

It's basically whatever you can afford. Any trash heap laptop can run code auto complete models locally no problem. The rest require some level of investment, an idle gaming pc, or a serious investment

rnxrx•1h ago

The arc of the technological universe is short, but it bends toward enshitification.

dannyw•1h ago

How do you expect the spend & COGS for free LLM inference to be funded? For users who don't want to pay, or maybe can't pay?

infinite_spin•54m ago

From things like defense/private contracts

e.g. colleges pay for institutional subscriptions

2ndorderthought•46m ago

The average person doesn't benefit from defense contracts ... Like ever.

IX-103•20m ago

The average person is slightly more female than male and has 2.1 children, but they do benefit from defense contracts since it makes up a small percentage of their salary.

derektank•47m ago

Perhaps it’s a glib and easy thing to say, but after a teaser period, I would simply not offer free LLM inference. Agreeing to serve ads just completely re-aligns your interests away from providing the best possible user experience to something else entirely.

iammrpayments•53m ago

It has begun ever since they nerfed chatgpt4 before releasing 4o

singingtoday•1h ago

I don't like anything about this.

djmips•1h ago

And it begins.

WD-42•1h ago

Since they are served as distinct events then I would think they should be easy to block.

Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.

lmbbuchodi•1h ago

you can block these URLs: |bzrcdn.openai.com^, ||bzr.openai.com^ It won't blanket block everything but will significantly reduce telemetry collected.

kardos•26m ago

> Once the ads are injected directly into the main response is when things get interesting.

This would be where you post-process the LLM response with a second LLM to remove the ad..

tempest_•13m ago

This is already how email works in the corporate world.

A writes email with chatgpt to B.

B sees big blob of text and summarizes email with chatgpt.

Adding an LLM in the middle is just the next step.

torben-friis•7m ago

It's like one of those memes about the worst possible date picker, except for a communication system.

TZubiri•19m ago

Blocking transparent ads is not a good idea. The consequence is that you will be fed opaque ads.

keyle•1h ago

Can't wait for "watch this ad for 90s to use xxhigh on your next prompt!"

uriahlight•1h ago

Let the enshittification commence!

vicchenai•1h ago

figured this was inevitable once they started the free tier. the attribution loop being a separate event stream is actually kind of clever engineering though -- means they can A/B test ad formats without touching the core model response

avaer•58m ago

Remember that ads are the "last resort" for OpenAI, and they're doing this despite the fact that it's "uniquely unsettling", according to Sam.

Was he lying, or has OpenAI given up hope that this train wreck works economically without enshittification? Neither option is good, but I don't really see a third.

Aurornis•39m ago

The ads are only for the free and $8/month plans. They basically added an ad-supported super discount level that you can ignore if you’re paying for the normal plans.

RussianCow•21m ago

But the fact that they've added an ad-supported tier this early into their life as a company means they're desperate for revenue. You start inserting ads when you're optimizing for profit, not when you're still growing. It took how long for Netflix to introduce an ad-supported plan?

milkshakes•18m ago

when did netflix offer a free tier?

infinite_spin•57m ago

I see OpenAI making a significantly larger amount from defense contracts than from advertisements pumped into chats. So I wonder whose bright idea it was to create a public perception risk.

peddling-brink•52m ago

Maybe the negative press from ads is better than the negative press from powering murderbots?

tayo42•37m ago

Bad press from a contract like that happens once and everyone forgets. Ads are in your face everytime

Larrikin•47m ago

Every single MBA can show for at least one quarter revenue is up after they introduced ads. They do not care what happens after if they can plan their career around that.

jesse_dot_id•54m ago

That's cool, I'll never see them.

benleejamin•52m ago

I'd always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content.

irjustin•41m ago

this would be a breach of trust and short term would work great but long term is too detrimental.

same thing could've been said for search results, so at least that part is still "safe".

bix6•39m ago

O you think trust matters? This is capitalism not trustism.

PradeetPatel•23m ago

Long term retention is built on brand trust and usability, then ensh*ttification happens.

nalekberov•22m ago

No, this is late stage capitalism without regulation.

SchemaLoad•23m ago

Long term all of the major LLM platforms will have invisible ads, influences, and propaganda woven into the content. The temptation will be irresistible for these companies.

ticulatedspline•13m ago

I think that's where they want to be. feels like everyone knows it too, that the long term expectation is basically being able to buy ad words and have LLMs lean responses towards whatever people bought.

Seems the playing field is a bit too open though, models are more fungible than the companies would hope so most of the current moat is brand based and seems like they're not ready to go all "Black Mirror" on us just yet.

senectus1•7m ago

I'm pretty sure that will be an eventual evolution of the product. The business model cant sustain itself as it is at the moment, eventually chatGPT wont be the product... we the users will be.

BoredPositron•45m ago

I don't get what's wrong with charging for your product. Like get rid of the free tier and make a small tier with an easy to serve model for like 5 bucks. Is it still the DAU rage of the 2010ss that's driving burning money?

teaearlgraycold•39m ago

How do you pick up new paying users without letting people use the service for free for a while first? Freemium is popular because it works well.

Aurornis•40m ago

The ads are in the free tier and the new ad-supported $8/month plan.

Every time this comes up there are comments assuming that ads are being injected into the normal plans, but these are for the free tier and the new Go plan which warns you that it includes ads when you sign up.

darepublic•33m ago

Would require a lot of training to implement ads blended into convo and not have it be too obvious/ eff up the results?

ceejayoz•18m ago

Cable TV was once ad free. So was Netflix. Companies just can’t help themselves.

dankwizard•38m ago

Really well written, technical post. Good read.

mock-possum•28m ago

Not to me they don’t, cause I canceled my account and stopped using their products when they made the announcement.

blackjack_•14m ago

It is one of the eternal lessons; All tech business plans eventually lead to serving ads. At least until we ban pixels / 3rd party tracking.

didip•9m ago

So news about OpenAI demise is real. They can’t sustain themselves without ads.

guluarte•4m ago

I've seen chatgpt suggest me more amazon products lately

torben-friis•4m ago

These are the less worrying kind of ads in our future.

Seeing how google has been fighting SEO for ages, what's going to happen when companies figure out how to inject ads into the model?

We haven't yet seen the problem of adversarial content in play, I think.

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Comments

Ghostty is leaving GitHub

ChatGPT serves ads. Here's the full attribution loop

Before GitHub

Claude system prompt bug wastes user money and bricks managed agents

We decreased our LLM costs with Opus

Claude for Creative Work

OpenAI models coming to Amazon Bedrock: Interview with OpenAI and AWS CEOs

Carrot Disclosure: Forgejo

I won a championship that doesn't exist

Intel Arc Pro B70 Review

Behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity rewires the brain after an experience

GitHub RCE Vulnerability: CVE-2026-3854 Breakdown

CJIT: C, Just in Time

Your phone is about to stop being yours

Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

Warp is now open-source

I have officially retired from Emacs

Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

A playable DOOM MCP app

VibeVoice: Open-source frontier voice AI

Patch applies fake diffs from commit messages

UAE to leave OPEC

Infisical (YC W23) Is Hiring Full Stack Software Engineers (Remote)

APL\? (1990)

Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Show HN: Drive any macOS app in the background without stealing the cursor

The biggest insect ever was a "dragonfly"

An update on GitHub availability

Waymo in Portland

Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API