2025-11-2911:31854737www.bleepingcomputer.com
OpenAI is now internally testing 'ads' inside ChatGPT that could redefine the web economy.
It is likely that ads will be limited to the search experience only, but that might change soon.
My understanding is that GPT ads could be highly personalised as the AI knows everything about you unless you disable the feature,
This is a developing story...
As MCP (Model Context Protocol) becomes the standard for connecting LLMs to tools and data, security teams are moving fast to keep these new services safe.
This free cheat sheet outlines 7 best practices you can start using today.
Read the original article
Comments
By aurareturn 2025-11-2912:4457 reply - ~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.
PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?
> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are
In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.
IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.
IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.
By SketchySeaBeast 2025-11-2914:5710 reply I can't wait for the instructions to start having ads embedded.
2. Place the turkey in your GE Two in One Oven set to 350, cooking for 10 minutes a lbs.
3. While waiting for your Turkey to finish cooking, why not have an ice cold Coke Zero? Click here for nearby locations.
4. Remove Turkey from the oven, let rest for ten minutes while listening to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sing "Die with a Smile" on Spotify.
This is where Tesla has a key advantage. Optimus can walk you to the kitchen to look for a Coke Zero. Google and OpenAI cannot compete with this.
this is one of those HN style comments where business acumen and pertinent sarcasm are wholly indistinguishable .
Poe's Law notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think I was making a good faith business acumen observation. If Optimus walks you to the kitchen to get a coke, what's Tesla's business model? Charge by the nanosecond for compute time?
Purchase/lease access to the hardware, subscription for the necessary online connectivity, and microtransactions for each actual use of it (ostensibly because of cloud compute, and that also means surveillance data is captured and monetized).
By wlesieutre 2025-11-3013:53 Sell you a $10,000 upgrade for Full Self Awareness capability then don’t deliver it an change the hardware requirements
By senordevnyc 2025-11-2917:473 reply Tesla doesn’t need a business model, they’re a meme stock.
By idiotsecant 2025-11-3013:53 Only on HN can you say something so obviously true and have a reply section full of uhm ackshuwllys.
By LanceJones 2025-11-300:441 reply Perhaps. I suppose the biggest in history then? $1.4T valuation and 60% of shares held by non-meme institutions (like pension funds, S&P tracking ETFs, etc) when you factor out insiders.
“The market can remain irrational longer than …” - John Maynard Keynes.
Oh, so that’s from him. This is the most state-interventionist economist. The fact that state actors trusted him for their policy since 1929 has more to do with a convergence of interests than rationality.
I’m not surprised that he started the ideology that markets were irrational.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-3013:40 Here’s a similar quote from the great enemy of markets, Benjamin Graham:
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
By wnmurphy 2025-11-306:26 Not saying that the stock isn't a meme stock, but my car literally drives itself everywhere. Tesla has many business models.
By staticman2 2025-11-2917:013 reply The robot suggested a coke zero because it was paid to by the Coca-Cola Company. Now you'll need to buy more coke zero to replace what you drank.
The business model for Tesla and xAI is actually very simple and superior to OpenAI and Google's. No, this is not satire:
The business model is that his companies are meme stocks, and controlling social media means controlling meme stocks. The business model is also that his companies require corporate socialism, and controlling social media means influencing government policy.
He can talk about AI driving cars, but that's yesterday's news. Today, his business model for AI is to put his finger on the scale and influence society to help him become richer. AI is threatening to replace search, but in a way it's also threatening part of what social media provides, namely the ability to guide discourse at scale.
What's easier: Getting his personal board to give him a trillion dollars, and shoring up public support for that with bias in his AI products and on X? Or building a trillion-dollar business?
Elon Musk's business model for AI is actually quite easy to understand.
By dreamcompiler 2025-11-300:442 reply And just like all meme stocks and so-called stablecoins, it'll work until it doesn't. The fall will be dramatic.
By idiotsecant 2025-11-3013:561 reply Stablecoins is a weird topic to randomly insert there. You want to elaborate on why all stablecoins will fail? This is a pretty ...novel take.
Stable coins fail when there's a run on the bank. Crypto is a wild west of unregulated banking. They have essentially become tools for money laundering and scam enablers, so it might take a while. But eventually the general public will say "no thanks" to a pain in the ass version of regular money. When the rush to the exits happen, the ~7 txn/s limit of Bitcoin will become painful.
By idiotsecant 2025-11-3019:161 reply What in the world are you talking about? What stablecoins are you talking about operating at 7tx/s? Why do stablecoins fail when there's a 'run on the bank'? You're mixing so many metaphors here that I'm not sure you know what you're talking about at all. This is a stablecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency). If it isn't permissionless it's not a 'stablecoin' it's an IOU.
By greycol 2025-11-3019:56 Without commenting on the rest of either of your posts, he is talking about how to trade between stable and other coins with that limit on Bitcoin. i.e. He is saying there will be so many people trading away stable coins for Bitcoins (as in Bitcoins not generic stand in for cryptocoin) or other coins that the 7tx/s limit of Bitcoin wallet transfers that it will become a significant factor as Bitcoin is used as a 'reserve currency' for these trades.
it won’t be. the same sane argument was that “robotaxi” fall will be dramatic but it wasn’t, Musk, like Trump, is a master at manipulating masses and when thing du jour inevitably fails he’ll just pivot on an earnings call (and on “X” along the way) how “thing du jour is yesterday’s news” and he’s onto “next big thing” - data center on Jupiter that will replace all earth’s data centers or something like that :)
By torginus 2025-11-3015:36 Honestly I think capitalism is a farce and I don't even have an emotional response to (b/tr)illionaires getting insane handouts and the stock valuations being insanely overpriced for even the most optimistic projections created by the companies themselves.
Okay rich guys, you get to have infinite free money.
But economists, I beg of you, I am willing to kiss your shoes, but please just admit that this causes inflation, and things aren't getting more expensive 'just because'
So lets see a $60k robot, lets say the whole economy crashes and money means nothing so they just call it $30k for kicks and giggles. Super cheap power since elon owns all the land now, he can have a tiny nuclear reactor every few house lengths. So $1 a day for power : 30365 / 365 days a year is about $80 a day in the first year, or maybe $40 a day assuming the reactors dont melt down for 2 years. So that is about 2 forced cokes down your throat per hour, 4 if you are a "known criminal" who is being robo-babysat. And that is still zero profit for elon because he has to shuffle all his assets around to the next farce of a fucking company
By pmontra 2025-11-309:10 This is hypothetical, in the spirit of your "economy crashes and money means nothing": if one has zero profit (in dollars) but somehow manages to own all the land and run the country, I'd say he profited a lot. Land and ruling are more tangible than money.
By DonHopkins 2025-11-301:34 But the damned robot keeps drinking all my Coke Zero!
By iosguyryan 2025-11-3020:16 Users will get used to ensuring a stable supply of said sponsored products, otherwise Optimus may get mad if said product was not in the fridge.
By dr_kretyn 2025-11-301:24 I'm still unsure whether you're Musk's fanboy or making a joke.
By iaw 2025-11-2915:57 Thank you for this comment, there is no way I could eloquently explain my read on the comment you're replying to the way you did.
By ljm 2025-11-3017:13 I enjoy the implied threat of being escorted to get a branded drink, and then getting frog marched to the local store if you’re out of supply.
By reactordev 2025-11-3013:44 Unless you’re not white, in which case it will spout nazi propaganda at you while starving you by refusing you entry to your fridge.
Let’s not sugar coat the future here.
Every time a tech bro says “Making the world a better place”, someone’s rights are being violated.
At least those are obvious. Them sneaking ads in that don't look like ads are what I'm more concerned about.
By jstummbillig 2025-11-308:116 reply That would be illegal.
I understand that there are a lot of strong opinions and open questions about OpenAI behavior – the amount of vigilantism is quite staggering – but if what they do is found to be clearly illegal by courts around the world, they will have to pay very hefty fines. Disguising ads is one such move. That's just not a winning business.
How much can you bias training to favor certain products before it becomes illegal? That seems like a similar question to "how much linear algebra do you have to do to copyrighted works before copyright doesn't apply anymore".
By zeroimpl 2025-11-308:50 I wonder if you could pay them to tweak the messaging about your products. So when a user asks: Is drinking Coke everyday good for my health, it starts saying yes because sugar is vital to our survival.
By jstummbillig 2025-11-3010:091 reply I don't get why we try to make the story so convoluted. They will just declare the ads, as all big platforms do. It's legal and it works. Why would they open themselves up to lawsuits over this? It's just not reasonable.
By adrianN 2025-11-3010:37 Every platform can do ads, but only AI platforms have an agent that can semi-intelligently try to convince the consumers of something.
By nikanj 2025-11-3011:15 AirBnB and Uber have demonstrated to all companies that legality doesn’t really matter as long as the numbers are good. It takes regulators an ungodly amount of time to act, and any well-written appeal buys you another 5 years for making political contributions
I don't know of any legal rulings or laws, which say not disclosing an embedded ad is illegal. In fact quite the opposite. There are loads and loads of prior such cases, movies, TV shows being an example.
For example every product mention (snapple, oh henry candy bars, jr mints) on Seinfeld was an ad. The skit is written, but any product can be dropped in. If no advertisers are interested, made up names are used.
This has been going on for 100+ years, including radio.
Why would ChatGPT be special?
By jstummbillig 2025-11-3023:211 reply US and EU law already cover this: undisclosed paid promotion that looks like neutral content is generally illegal (FTC Act + Endorsement Guides in the US, UCPD + DSA in the EU). Product placement in old TV/film is the historical exception, not the rule. An interactive "assistant" secretly steering you because someone paid for it is legally much closer to a deceptive influencer ad than to a Snapple bottle in Seinfeld.
By b112 2025-12-013:15 FTC looks like its legislation is from the 70s, yet it is still being done in TV and movies.
Legislation has to be interpreted by courts, and there is surely lots of caselaw. I'd look there, as to why it is OK.
Regardless, is there a ToS you agreed to, that disclosess it will happen? TV doesn't have a ToS nor a movie theater, yet ChatGPT can have one.
One last thing... openai pulled off the largest, unlicensed use of copyright material ever, and is fine.
Meanwhile, TV already has embedded ads...
By randomNumber7 2025-11-309:51 There is too much money beeing made. It's naive to think the courts will stop it.
By Starlevel004 2025-11-3013:39 > That would be illegal.
Yeah, so?
By scuff3d 2025-11-3018:48 Their entire business model is currently based on legally questionable practices. I'd argue they wouldn't even exist without massive copyright infringement and utter disregard for software licences.
To my knowledge there is absolutely no legal precedent for one company simply paying to have themselves more heavily weighted in the training data. So it just happens that they show up more in responses then their competitors.
By idiotsecant 2025-11-3014:00 They won't have to sneak in anything. On the contrary. The world is about to be deluged with a monsoon of personalized advertising the likes of which you've only previously imagined. They have the data, they have the buyers, they just so far don't have the means. All this AI hardware has to do something to justify its staggering cost and all that compute, all those datacenters, are going to be devoted to crafting personalized sales pitches. The distilled essence of all of humanity's information is going to sell you boner pulls and hair loss supplements
The enshittification of the LLM has begun and it'll be one of the all time shittiest ones.
By mirekrusin 2025-11-307:41 Trueman Show but without expensive dome.
By hyperadvanced 2025-11-2917:31 Drink verification can
You’ll wish it was that and not “a word from our sponsor NordVPN” or scammy crypto investments
By gs17 2025-11-2919:16 It'll be hilarious (in a tragic way) if Google adds ads to Gemini using their existing platform and suddenly it becomes a scammer in the middle of chats.
By dzonga 2025-11-2921:32 there was a black mirror episode regarding something similar
By ponector 2025-11-2916:45 There should be also mentioned brand of the kitchenette supplier, utensils and every food component with Amazon wishlist ready to order.
By ekropotin 2025-11-2918:54 It was in Black Mirror
By inetknght 2025-11-2916:26 Missed opportunity for brands of turkeys
By sandworm101 2025-11-2917:12 It wont be that obvious. It will explain to you the dangers of doing your own cooking, the number killed by food poisioning each year, then suggest something from doordash instead. Or it will suggest you eat something faster, like pop tarts, so you can spend less time cooking and more time interacting with your AI buddy.
By fennecbutt 2025-11-3014:43 I mean if someone is using it for free then this is fine?
We haven't yet evolved to the point where we make all advertising illegal, or owning second homes, etc. ;3
> So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.
every single platform since the 1990's has introduced ads. My kids find it totally normal to have them. Believe me, if you train (!) people to accept ads, they will soon think it's normal.
And besides, if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly. So the users won't have the choice anymore.
But ok, if I have to pay for a service without ads, then let it be. Paying for a service is normal too.
Don't worry, you'll pay for the service and get ads. It's the inevitable end-state of these kinds of services.
Amazon prime video showed us that.
First no ads. Then ad free if you pay extra. Then “ad free” except half the shows have a “this show requires ads” bs and still have ads. Scummy flea ridden advertisers at their core.
And Netflix follows suit. You think you can escape the ads? Think again.
By nebula8804 2025-11-3011:271 reply Yes we can. Pirate the stuff, they try to block it? Use a seedbox.
Same goes for AI. This will accelerate options for private hosted AI. Which I guess will happen eventually anyway once cheap hardware gets to a state where you can run X model size at home for cheap.
As always its the people in the know that have the upper hand. The mass user base does not have this knowledge unfortunately. They might just stop using the service if no competitor steps up. We are seeing it with streaming cancellations.
By kzzzznot 2025-11-3013:26 Most people don’t do this and won’t start
By eastbound 2025-11-308:41 Amazon prime video, when you pay for the subscription, half of the content in the content lists are paid. That’s right, you pay for a subscription that suggests PpV content.
Counter point - my kid hates ads. I've worked to keep them away from him and whenever they do sneak through he gets irritated at them.
By tasuki 2025-11-2921:47 Mine does too. I make sure there are no ads on the screens, but ads in print are harder to adblock. She hasn't seen too many, yet at four years old could distinguish an ad in a kid's magazine in under a second.
> if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly
Eventually. But Google has an absolute ton of places to put ads today and are profitable enough that they can subsidise their AI operation much longer than OpenAI can. If it’s a competitive advantage to remain ad-less they have the ability to do it.
remaining ad-less isn't a competitive advantage for google.. advertisers want the use the best medium available to reach customers and clearly ai chatbots are better suited for that than the old web of google search. openai has reached the critical user base where they could easily replace google for advertisers.
> clearly ai chatbots are better suited for that than the old web of google search
Why is this clearly the case?
By razingeden 2025-11-307:311 reply if you think about it, the current advertising paradigm infers things about you, from cookies and trackers, from data brokers etc (to show you “relevant” ads.
and things you “like” or “follow” or comment on , or maybe even just making guesses at your race, job, income, sexual orientation, politics etc based on who youre “friends” with.
all of thats on the decline: social media engagement on legacy platforms is down, people are blocking cookies and or javascript. california is making an opt out tool for data brokers (and its going live in a month or two)
people have hours long conversations with chatgpt about things like what theyre working on. so it might know your job, talents, skills. things planning (aspirations) , things you asked it how to cook, or whats wrong with them medically. or maybe theyve dished to it about other personal stuff they thought was 100% in confidence up until now.
then now that its “private”, advertisers cant get backlash for showing ads next to controversial content, or people who are “supposed to be cancelled”. it removes a pressure point for accidentally (or deliberately) displaying their content somewhere its inappropriate or problematic for the brand— by hiding the interaction (and ads) in a “private” chat—
just for starters.
were at a point where publishers are nagging about our popup blockers and having hissy fits or refusing to load the page until their ads are whitelisted. so you know enough people are doing it to impact peoples business models now.
ill personly disable JS altogether for sites that do that but a lot of people just wont return.
its a dying media the way it exists.
so now all these ad providers (meta, google, twitter) are in on AI . and here comes openAI for all three of their lunches.
this just opened my eyes to what is at stake here and why its all being shoved down everyones throats. sure i use them, but i also have local models installed id drop them in an instant for if my chats were used to show me ads.
then just wait for ANY of these two entities to merge and overwhelm your social media feed with the next twenty years of ads full of junk the “AI” learned about you.
By bpt3 2025-12-0113:50 The people who use chatGPT or Claude are replacing Google searches with chat conversations. Google already has most of what you're talking about from queries, so they don't need to infer much.
These companies are in on AI because there was a rush to produce the first GAI, which would be immensely valuable. I think we'll see it shortly after the first fully self driving car.
By ViewTrick1002 2025-11-2916:33 But many of them have failed to achieve the necessary profitability.
For example Snapchat, Reddit etc.
> So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.
I'm certain the ads will be introduced in an easily identifiable and ignorable way. People will acclimate, user behavior will be analyzed, and over time the dial will ever so slowly be turned up to optimize for draining as much attention and money from the consumer as possible.
By LogicFailsMe 2025-11-2915:591 reply You'll just need to run a small local model to filter out the ads. And they just become another one of those silly arms races between the ad makers and the ad blockers and we all burn more electricity.
By luckman212 2025-11-2916:09 but AI will calculate precisely the optimal amount of electricity to waste. so, win win
Yeah, I saw several people who only first tried AI chats on Google's new "AI Mode", which uses Gemini, but doesn't mention it anywhere.
By lxgr 2025-11-2914:29 Even “AI mode” isn’t mainstream yet, at least in my observation.
“AI summaries” are, but they seem to be powered by an even weaker model.
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-11-2914:31 I am not exactly a great example ( exposure to work model, ollama, local models play ) and I actually liked gemini upon try in google search ( which is amusingly now banned at work ), but the nice quickly fell into not nice, when it started giving me weird pushback on operation paperclip book ( I am assuming chapter discussing tabun triggered something. This is my only real problem with gemini. By comparison, I am not running into guardrails with gpt nearly as often.
> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are
That's actually changed a while ago.
By state_less 2025-11-2915:152 reply Chatgpt is a proprietary eponym[1], like kleenex, or Google for search. That's a relatively strong attractor based on their first mover status. I nevertheless use tissues, and search engines like brave search, sometimes duckduckgo, and claude or openrouter for my LLM models.
I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.
The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.
1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.
By cameronh90 2025-11-2916:282 reply I think I hear as many people calling it ChatGBT or ChatGTP as ChatGPT.
By state_less 2025-11-2917:10 "Oh no it's GPT, a Generative Pretrained Transformer shaped into chat responses."
By DANmode 2025-11-301:27 None of which, when searched, will lead the user to Claude, Qwen, et al.
Just OpenAI and ChatGPT.
So what’s your point?
By FarmerPotato 2025-11-302:56 Chachapita
Weirdly, I think Perplexity is getting a lot of mainstream name recognition because of podcasts. All the big slop pods like Rogan, Theo Von, etc are sponsored by Perplexity and the hosts constantly name check it by asking to “look stuff up on Perplexity”. Honestly pretty smart marketing all things considered.
By delaminator 2025-11-309:411 reply Perplexity sponsors Lewis Hamilton, with a prime spot on his helmet so every on board shot has their logo.
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-x-lewis-hamilt...
Here it is in action
By nebula8804 2025-11-3011:312 reply How can we even measure whether this has any effect on people? This seems like a lousy way to get the word out.
By delaminator 2025-11-3012:26 FTX was his sponsor at Mercedes, and Crowdstrike still is worth them.
Oracle is the biggest logo on the it the Red Bull.
They all must think it is worth it. In guesses they get paddock passes and hospitality to schmooze in Qatar.
By delaminator 2025-11-3022:53 Other F1 sponsors - Gemini on McLaren along with FxPro and Android, Kick on Sauber, Crypto.com on trackside hoardings, Atlassian on the Williams, 1Password on the RedBull
By nebula8804 2025-11-3011:30 Does Rogan even know what Perplexity is or is he just reading ad copy? Has it come up in a podcast? I think he only has ever mentioned Grok and ChatGPT. Dont even think Claude has ever come up. He has done that crap before, just reading an ad without any usage of the product. They all do it.
Claude? I’d be extremely surprised.
Gemini? As gemini.google.com or as the thoroughly mediocre “AI summaries” on top of Google Search results?
Claude has been aggressively advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, and the ads have been much more general use than just the code benefits. They’re definitely no ChatGPT, but they’re not an unknown player.
You're only seeing those ads because the ad algorithm knows you. My family aren't getting Claude ads. They wouldn't know the first thing about it even if it were explained to them.
By JohnnyMarcone 2025-12-011:37 I saw a Claude ad before watching Wicked for Good in the theater. I was surprised.
By lanyard-textile 2025-11-2915:16 From the advertisements I’ve seen, only in the bay area, I honestly wouldn’t know Claude “competed” with ChatGPT unless I knew of it beforehand.
For me that’s mostly because every AI startup is promising the moon on their billboards, lol.
By mrbombastic 2025-11-2914:391 reply Yeah my father who codes occasionally asked me what the best AI for coding was and he had never even heard of claude so I would be very surprised if your average person knows it.
By yesimahuman 2025-11-2914:50 They absolutely do not. It took getting out of tech a few years to realize how hilariously out of touch we can be in this industry
By adrianwaj 2025-11-306:40 Yeah, Google should have got gemini.com and gemini.ai before settling on that name, just like Claude. Instead they go to the same crypto service. It would've cleared up some confusion.
By DANmode 2025-11-301:23 Disagree.
Wait - are you in California?
> IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI.
Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.
Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.
And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.
> You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads".
Google is a multi trillion dollar ads company. So is meta.
Don’t underestimate ads.
By Verdex 2025-11-3020:29 Sure, but
> If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.
they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do
The way that Google is rolling out AI is confusing, and I imagine a lot of people who can access Gemini don't actually know they can or how to use it. Among those that do know, many won't know what it's capable of and will believe that they need to pay for a service like ChatGPT in order to get what they want.
By stOneskull 2025-11-308:04 i'd guess co-pilot or bing. so many people use microsoft edge and office, not to mention windows itself.
By agumonkey 2025-11-3012:30 Google the search engine was on a down trend before. And, hallucinations aside, pagerank++ search is primitive compared to an LLM, and I wonder if people won't associate the new "natural language conversation search" to chatgpt more than google now.
By Invictus0 2025-11-2917:29 This is the curlftpfs comment all over again
By 3uler 2025-11-3012:40 Google had a good 10 year run, where the ads were genuinely useful, until the need of the public markets required and lack of competition allowed them to enshitify the experience to the current state.
I hope the same fate does not await ChatGPT but in the mean time I expect it to be a pretty good experience at first.
And yet most of the people I know, including many technical ones, default to ChatGPT before Google's AI Studio. Google has general brand awareness, but ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI
By afavour 2025-11-2914:20 > ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI
I agree but how many consumers actively purchase Bandaid or Kleenex over cheaper store brands? Becoming a generic term doesn’t always translate to great business. “I’ll put it into chat” could easily end up meaning “enter into Google’s AI prompt” for many people.
By array_key_first 2025-11-2915:45 Bandaid and Kleenex are commodities. Nobody has a problem using a different, cheaper tissue brand and calling it Kleenex.
Consumers like chat, not chatGPT. Does it do a chat thing? Good enough for consumers. They'll probably call it chatgpt too.
Fun fact: that's called a generic trademark
When you call your product "(Chat) Generative Pretrained Transformer" then I don't think you have a great defense against genericisation.
The legal history of these is interesting, lots of household names have lost their trademarks, and lots of seemingly generic names are still trademarked. This way to the rabbit hole -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
By kccqzy 2025-11-2915:05 OpenAI does worse than that. It tried to make GPT a trademark but USPTO rejected it. So it’s not even a trademark let alone a generic trademark.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97733259&docI...
By materielle 2025-11-2914:146 reply I think investors would certainly love this. So why hasn’t it already happened?
My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.
Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.
But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.
After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.
Yup, it’s essentially an admission of failure. I think the people who were expecting AI to improve exponentially are disappointed by its current state, where it’s basically just a useful tool to assist workers in some highly specific fields.
By kjkjadksj 2025-11-2915:21 Highly specific fields? They are trying to get you to reach for ai when an emailed “ok, thanks” would do. They want you to lose your ability to write and formulate thoughts without the tool. Then it is really over. That is the golden goose. Not a couple data scientists.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-11-2922:081 reply > it’s essentially an admission of failure
A multibillion dollar failure is fine by investors. Altman hasn’t been peddling the AGI BS to them. That’s aimed at the public and policymakers.
By ForHackernews 2025-11-3012:57 Is a trillion dollar failure okay with investors?
Aka you need them deep enough into the trap they can’t escape, before you trigger it.
By smallmancontrov 2025-11-2914:411 reply Yes and there are layers. Remember when google ads had yellow backgrounds? I'm sure OpenAI will find a way to do ads "ethically"... for a while, until people get comfortable, and that's when they will start to make ChatGPT increasingly manipulative.
By smallmancontrov 2025-11-2917:13 > The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
By SketchySeaBeast 2025-11-2915:042 reply Can anyone explain to me what ChatGPT does that traps people? I get the value as tools, I like using copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't offer me value that any other LLM can't. Given that everyone is quickly rolling "AI" into their own stuff, I don't see what's ChatGPT's killer app. If anything, I think Gemini is better positioned to capture the general user market.
They make it a habit to use them, by offloading that part of their thinking/process to them. It’s similar to Google Maps, or even Google itself.
When was the last time you went to an actual physical library, for instance? Or pulled out a paper map?
Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.
That is what the race is about (in large part), who can become ‘the norm’.
By ewoodrich 2025-11-2920:38 I also wouldn't underestimate Google's ability to nudge regular users towards whichever AI surface they want to promote. My highly non-technical mom recently told me she started using Google's "AI Mode" or whatever it's called for most of her searches (she says she likes how it can search/compare multiple sites for browsing house listings and stuff).
She doesn't really install apps and never felt a need to learn a new tool like "ChatGPT" but the transition from regular Google search to "AI Search" felt really natural and also made it easy to switch back to regular search if it wasn't useful for specific types of searches.
It definitely reduces cognitive load for an average user not needing to switch between multiple apps/websites to lookup hours/reviews via Google Maps, search for "facebook.com" to navigate to a site and now run AI searches all in the same familiar places on her phone. So I think Google is still pretty "sticky" despite ChatGPT being a buzzword everyone hears now that they caught up to OpenAI in terms of model capability/features.
> When was the last time you went to an actual physical library
My eyesight is making paper books harder and harder to read, so I don't go to libraries and bookstores as much as I used to. But I think libraries are still relatively popular with families, because they're sites of various community activities as well as safe, quiet places to let kids roam and entertain themselves while the parents are nearby.
When I was a kid, my parents went to the library much more often than they do now, because they were taking me and my sister there. And then we would all get books before we came home.
Not saying you're entirely wrong, but there's a significant part of this that is "changing rhythms of life as we age", not just "changing times".
By lazide 2025-11-2917:21 It used to be, people went to the library to look things up, and as a primary source for finding information they needed. Not just as a community center.
That is my point.
By SketchySeaBeast 2025-11-2915:44 > Gemini is a competitor, yes. But most people still go to Google at this point, even if there are a ton of competitors.
Yeah, that's my point. If Google is good enough I don't think people are going to want to do those extra steps, just as in your google maps example. There might be better services out there, but google maps are just too convenient.
By lanyard-textile 2025-11-2915:32 The branding is so strong and it works well enough (I’d say, according to the perception of most people) that it’s just the first “obvious” choice.
Akin to nobody getting fired for choosing AWS, nobody would think poorly of you using ChatGPT.
I don’t think Claude has that same presence yet.
Google has a reputation for being a risk to develop with, and I think they flopped on marketing for general users. It’s hard to compete with “ChatGPT” where there’s a perceived call to action right in the name; You don’t really know what Gemini is for until it’s explained.
By raincole 2025-11-3011:50 Would've happened if Claude and Gemini weren't things. But they are.
Regardless of AGI, being known as the only LLM that introduced ads sounds very bad.
It also is impossible to work properly: either they also screwup the entire API to break everyones programmatic access to coding and regular apps, or else everyone just starts making wrappers around the API to make without-ad-chatbots
By hattmall 2025-11-304:38 Why would they need ads on API though, API is paid usage. They just need a few years of scaling for it to be profitable. Some models are already a net profit on API usage.
By roboror 2025-11-2914:43 I agree but even if AGI is possible within 5-10 years it must be hard to justify maintaining or even increasing this level of burn for much longer.
If there's one thing the history of mass internet servuces teaches us, it is that people switch to platforms with superior product/experience in an instant.
Remember Lycos, Yahoo, & Hotmail? They all had strong userbases for their time who switched in an instant to Google Search & Gmail.
Even with network effects, it is very difficult to compete without outright superiority - remember Orkut, MySpace, Google Plus or even Facebook? Meta made the right decision buying Instagram and WhatsApp instead of trying to sustain Facebook.
There are no lock-ins in Chat assistants at all and no network effects. All evidence suggests now cutting edge high performance models are mostly coming out of Google, Anthropic etc and high efficiency models are coming out of China. ChatGPT also appears to have a disadvantage in the talent war - mostly because talent seems to not like to work with the management.
Also almost no one I know uses ChatGPT now as their primary AI assistant now because they feel the quality of answers from others are simply superior (I check case by case) and the same seems to hold in more formal tests in AI enabled product development. Even Microsoft has started hedging bets with Anthropic.
OpenAI really really needs to focus on outright superiority or it's going to be interesting to see how the financial shakeout is going to play.
By doctorpangloss 2025-11-304:201 reply Nah, people using Yahoo are still using it today. What happened was the growth of new users of the Internet in general was so massive, T+1 cohort’s early adopters outnumbered T cohort’s majority. the better product won, it’s just that the friction of switching didn’t matter. Switchers didn’t matter.
By the_pwner224 2025-11-308:231 reply On one hand, true, my mom still uses Yahoo. But email has a strong network effect - you need to update everyone & every service who has your @yahoo address. Switching does happen there are no network effects. Nobody uses Mapquest or Ask Jeeves.
By doctorpangloss 2025-11-3014:49 Haha so many people were using Mapquest it was acquired in 2019
Only a short matter of time before agentic tools start serving ads too - paying user or not. You want to refactor your codebase ? No issue - taking 30 seconds - please view this ad meanwhile.
You won’t just be viewing an ad, you will have to actively engage in a minute long sales talk with the LLM.
By placatedmayhem 2025-11-2913:591 reply In my head, it'll be like the high pressure timeshare sales pitches or the dreaded car sales transactions, where they pull out all the tricks to convince you to buy something you don't actually want or need, regardless of whether you can afford it.
By simianparrot 2025-11-2914:12 “That’s a great point about your finances. But did you know this company offers credit to someone in your position for only this low interest? I can apply on your behalf if you just sign this statement”
By jijijijij 2025-11-3017:30 The code will come out just fine, so your atrophied brain will remain dependent on OliCorp's parasocial prosthesis for strenuous thinking, dissolving wariness in experiences of super productivity. Then elsewhere, when plausible, OliCorp will progressively nudge you in some direction sold as predefined weight bonus to third party customers. You won't even notice and really, isn't it a fair price for all that productivity? Of course, AI isn't always right yet, but I'd say in a very practical 95% of cases your goals and expectations are in alignment with OliCorp AI.
Don't forget, every website and service monetized automated access as a consequence of the AI scraping boom and made unauthorized web-indexing impossible, traditional search dried off. And when OliCorp finally turned off access to their legacy index monopoly in favor of AI interfacing, you really have no choice but to trust your friendly chat buddy. Who else are you gonna ask for the fix? Former friends, your family or neighbors? People you've grown to hate because sympathetic local clustering is discouraged through four color divisive information shaping. I mean, those guys really are at fault for your lack of self-efficacy, the hate is warranted. And you're too tired to bother anyway.
By teeray 2025-11-2915:11 “We’ll finish up your feature soon. In the meantime, have you considered a timeshare in Vegas?”
It’s worse than that. It will be more akin to ad placement in movies, except in this case it will slip this proprietary library into the suggested solution instead of that one. Or embed ads in the solution code.
By soared 2025-11-2920:37 Gemini kind of already does this. I use builder in AI studio and it tends to use Gemini in places where other solutions make more sense. Last week I needed users to input their address, validate it, and geo code it. Rather than using google maps APIs (way cheaper, free tier) it used Gemini to do it.
By tcoff91 2025-11-2915:34 I think getting a model to do this without hurting alignment significantly will be very difficult.
By sidrag22 2025-11-2916:58 eh, maybe for the super vibey tools. I can't imagine anyone who wants to maintain the trust of devs would do this, they would so quickly pivot to something else, its not like the general public, where AI == chatgpt in their mind.
By solumunus 2025-11-2914:09 I highly doubt this one. These agents are pretty interchangeable, any one of them could decide to not show ads and steal huge market share. Programming is one of the few areas they can actually make gross margin, so ads would be a terrible business decision given the above. The ad revenue from it would be insignificant against the API calls / subscriptions.
Why stop there? You want to refactor your codebase? Sure, but you need to adopt this dependency and this cloud service.
Mixing Ads or sponsorships to influence LLMs is a really, really bad idea. Especially when they're competing with Search ... which means that for some, "AIs" are the only window into the world when looking something up.
> Sure, but you need to adopt this dependency and this cloud service.
THIS.
Asked to make an app using AWS? “I can do that, but have you considered the lower lifetime costs of using Azure? I can generate a configuration for AWS, Azure, or produce a price comparison table. Let me know which you prefer.”
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:153 reply Absolutely no business with any real money is going to be swayed to use one cloud provider over the other based on one vibe coded app.
There is so much other stuff that goes into why business make decisions about any large contract. I’m not in cloud sales. But I venture just close enough to the sun not to get burned
> Absolutely no business with any real money is going to be swayed
And what about everyone starting something? Or prototyping? And what if you don't have a choice: pay more or follow our sponsored guidelines?
This is a dangerous road without proper defences both in terms of legislation and policy (and I mean world-wide, world corps = world laws, not having to go to court in every country lol).
Also, end users need to be educated about all this because what is to stop John or Jane from uploading their receipts to GPT to make their taxes and ... oops "did you know you can switch insurance to XYZ" or ... AI browser proactively hiding content competing with their partners ... you looking for a healthcare package? The only one available is from our sponsor. Take it or leave it.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2916:23 The tax situation already happens now with Intuit owning both Turbo Tax and CreditKarma to get you to sign up for credit cards.
If I were prototyping something and found I could do it cheaper somewhere else, I’m not sure I would be upset. I hate ads just for the bad user experience.
As long as it is clearly an ad and they say they have affiliations. It’s no different than what Google and Amazon does now.
But ironically enough, I was almost about to pay for Overcast years ago even though the author openly admitted that you didn’t get much of anything for it except for supporting him back then.
He then added a non slimy self hosted system to buy ads for other podcasts based on the category of podcast you were listening to at that very second (no tracking). I thought that was a great service.
I think I would actually lean into a tight integration between ChatGPT and something like booking.com[1], AirBNB, GetYourGuide, etc when looking for travel ideas.
[1] Well I personally wouldn’t because I am not as cost conscience as the average traveler and I value the loyalty programs and status of certain hotel chains and Delta airlines. But most travelers don’t and shouldn’t care.
But if they let me put in my loyalty numbers and book directly with Hyatt, Hilton and Delta, hell I might pay more for ChatGPT.
By marcosdumay 2025-11-2915:431 reply That's a nice, sane world that you live in. How can one get there?
AFAIK, one wrong person getting an answer like the OP's is more than enough to force a medium sized (dozens of people) business to migrate.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:541 reply How many medium size migrations have you done? Its never that easy even if you are just hosting a bunch of VMs. Let alone if you are using any cloud specific services.
I have been involved in a few on the periphery working in cloud consulting (first at AWS itself and now an outside company). I actively avoid the “lift and shifts”. I come in for the “modernize” portion.
https://www.synatic.com/blog/lift-and-shift-vs-modernization
By marcosdumay 2025-11-2917:381 reply Done? none, I wouldn't do it. Undone after it failed, one, and helped some other people in others.
You are expecting people to act rationally in a way that will succeed. That's not how a lot of places out there operate.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2918:331 reply I have been either part of or opted out of well over a dozen - I have a policy of never leading “lift and shifts” (and never staff augmentation).
Once you actually sit down and come up with a project plan with your PMO, a cloud migration is hardly ever worth the effort unless the destination cloud provider is backing up a shit ton of money for not only operational credits but also for internal AWS Professional Services (where I worked when I was inside AWS) or an outside partner to help (current employer).
Hell even certain departments at Amazon would never go through the effort of migrating to AWS from the legacy CDO infrastructure.
The risk of regressions, the refactoring, the retraining, the politics, etc are hardly ever worth it.
By 12_throw_away 2025-11-301:41 > Once you actually sit down and come up with a project plan with your PMO [...] The risk of regressions, the refactoring, the retraining, the politics, etc are hardly ever worth it.
You are entirely correct, of course ... except that much of the management class simply does not care about any of those things.
Not to mention the sizable contingent of engineers will repeatedly get suckered by the pitch of "Just migrate all of your stuff to [shiny new thing] and all of your [reliable old thing] problems will go away" (a.k.a., "engineers with management potential")
By otabdeveloper4 2025-11-3015:26 > Absolutely no business with any real money is going to be swayed to use one cloud provider over the other based on one vibe coded app.
Lol. Sweet summer child.
Only a matter of time before using coding agents with local LLMs is a viable alternative.
By fxtentacle 2025-11-2914:40 I’m quite happy with my offline AI solution:
By adam_patarino 2025-11-2914:023 reply [dead]
Why it needs to work only on a Mac? And why is that better than running the gpt oss with llama.cpp and codex on my Linux box?
By adam_patarino 2025-11-2917:39 Our model is bigger and more capable than gpt OSS and can run at full context at 40 tokens / s.
We are rolling out to Mac to start with plans to release windows and Linux within 3 months.
By yorwba 2025-11-2914:26 "Join the Waitlist"
By adam_patarino 2025-11-2917:40 We will have windows and Linux early next year! Just starting with Mac for first beta testers
They don't need to make us view ads anymore...just say
,,Allow Vercel to use credit card stored by OpenAI''...click to continue refactoring
By soared 2025-11-2920:38 Stripe already built this out and it’s in ChatGPT. Some merchants let you buy directly in the chat interface, and payment credentials are shared through the chat interface to the store (securely, etc)
By Ekaros 2025-11-2917:16 How soon will coding agents start injecting paid saas service calls in the code? And when in agentic mode, automatically sing up the coder to them?
By Eggpants 2025-11-2914:43 It will be like AdWords, pay to have specific token output replaced by your trademark.
this_variable_is_sponsored_by_coinbase = 42
I’m just exaggerating … I hope.
By nerdponx 2025-11-2913:38 Extra convenient because people are already used to these things taking several seconds to respond.
By elemdos 2025-11-2913:47 Maybe that could result in a free tier? If the numbers work out
By philjohn 2025-11-2915:06 "This bugfix is brought to you by ... Costco"
By reeredfdfdf 2025-11-2914:03 "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."
I'm not sure that really is the case. Most non-techies I know use ChatGPT far less than they use Google search, let alone various social media apps they're addicted to.
Perhaps it is a threat to Google search, but I can't see how it's going to be threat to ad revenue from Meta, Youtube etc - the services that are actually addictive due to the content they serve. At least for me there's absolutely nothing addictive about ChatGPT. It's just a tool that helps me solve certain types of problems, not something I enjoy to use.
By iLoveOncall 2025-11-2913:081 reply Trust in LLMs is easily broken, and many users are starting to see the cracks. Once those AI companies start rolling out ads inserted in the answers, the quality will go down even more, and they will burn the last good will of the people.
There is no moat because their only way to make money is to self-destruct.
Talking on a more practical POV, your cost to display the ads needs to be lower than what companies pay you for advertising. And while companies might be willing to pay a small premium for "better" targeting because the LLM supposedly has more personal data about users, the cost to deliver those ads (generating answers via LLMs) is several orders of magnitude higher than for traditional ads served on websites.
So even sticking to a purely technical aspect, ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.
Combine the two aspects, and OpenAI is all but a dead company.
> ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.
This is wishful thinking.
Companies are using LLMs for development. The ads are not for a $50 throw pillow, they are for a $10k monthly business-critical service.
Consumers might not be worth advertising to (although I doubt it), but B2B ads - absolutely.
By delaminator 2025-11-3012:22 If there is a $10k monthly business critical service, are ChatGPT ads going to sway you?
I’m actually one of the people that continue to say even with this list they have no moat, because Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. can just embed a chatbot in their existing products or social network and make ChatGPT irrelevant overnight. Non tech users will chat through their browser, OS, Apps, website, that’ll be served by any model provider. The only moat of OpenAI is investor money to burn so that they can offer it for free.
Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses. Their only path to survival is a massively downgraded free tier ridden with ads. Nobody will use an app like this when they can have a better more integrated experience directly in their other apps.
By NewsaHackO 2025-11-2915:05 What do you mean the can? All of those services have already done this, but they have not slowed ChatGPT down.
By marcosdumay 2025-11-2915:591 reply > Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses.
Nah, it's just one order of magnitude...
Also, they expect revenue to grow exponentially so it's 20 billions annualized by the end of the year. Last time I saw somebody talk about it, it was about half of it, and trending down.
Anyway, if they manage to take ~20% of the ads revenue from Google, they will be able to cover ongoing depreciation! That's the amount of money they need.
By ViewTrick1002 2025-11-2916:411 reply The problem is that inference is a whole different ballgame in terms of costs compared to a traditional SaaS model where each extra customer adds near zero in cost.
They may make it work but OpenAI is more akin to a traditional high revenue low profit business like for example a grocery store.
Thats why we are seeing the explosion of extra tools to try lock in business for higher value use cases and not fight on the margin.
By delaminator 2025-11-3011:29 In the UK, £1 of every £3 spent on groceries is in Tesco supermarket.
They have just under 7% gross margin on £70bn of revenue.
OpenAI are going to need to sell a lot of ads to pay that $300bn bill they have coming.
> - Extremely personal data on users - Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products
Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? We managed to radicalise people into the rise and fall of entire countries through analog ads, can you imagine how devastating it would be to infuse every digital product with all that?
this was the goal the entire time, and they had the nerve to cynically call themselves a non-profit.
That was just to set the trap. Start off with a trustable label, then rugpull.
By big-and-small 2025-11-2917:31 Also appeal to investors. Nobody would give tons of money to upstart which goal is to generate text porn, generated TikTok slop and make some needy teens suicide just to compete with Google Ads.
Selling big AGI dream that will literally make winner take it all is much more desirable.
By DrewADesign 2025-11-2914:212 reply You know, I thought stories of law enforcement and the military targeting people using commercially collected data, effectively skirting the sanity boundaries we applied to surveillance, would raise a little bit of awareness in the US. It didn’t. Then when the political scene got really into deliberately targeting political opposition, I thought that might raise more eyebrows about all of this data being out there, but it didn’t. Same with ICE and border patrol. I think the risk and mechanisms will remain too abstract for people to grasp until they’re one of the unlucky people staring down the barrel of a gun because they, or someone they were associated with, had the wrong opinions.
This has echos of “First They Came” [0]. The current status quo begs a question that must have been asked in the time it was written: at what point does it have become morally acceptable for citizens to rise up and overthrow a violent government?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came?wprov=sfti1#
By mindslight 2025-11-2915:501 reply The current dynamic IS based on the new gestapo thinking they're "rising up and overthrowing a violent government", due to a propaganda bubble thirty years in the making. Where do you think "ICE" is getting all of these new recruits from? The red state militias that have been seething about the slow creep of bureaucratic authoritarianism, now deputized and told they get to use their weapons to attack the other tribe. Which is also why said militias are silent now that it's actually time to defend our country from fascists - they are the fascists. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
So we agree, we shouldn't let AI companies mix their products with government or ad-inspired insights, right?
By mindslight 2025-11-2916:25 You seem to be stating this like I said something that might imply otherwise, but I can't figure it out even seeing you've got the GGGP comment. This thread kind of went off on a tangent that isn't directly addressing your original point.
But to hopefully answer your question - yes I'm in favor of wholesale importing the GDPR as-written into US law and letting the courts sort it out (sidestepping the corruption^Wlobbying process wherein corpos would make "small" edits that effectively gimp it with loopholes). I'm also in favor of antitrust enforcement against companies that anticompetitively bundle software with hardware and/or services - ie people should be able to choose software which doesn't have ads, rather than being coerced by the pressure of network effects. And if neither if those were enough to stamp out the consumer surveillance industry (aka "Big Tech") as we know it, then I'd support directly banning personalized advertising.
(I would support directly curtailing government from abusing commercial surveillance databases as well, but I don't see a straightforward meta-way to prevent that besides drastically shrinking the commercial databases to begin with)
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:241 reply It’s not that they don’t care - the current administration is targeting people that they specifically don’t like.
And Trump has a cult of personality where many Republican politicians are literally afraid for their lives if they stand against him because they get death threats.
Romney said other Republican politicians won’t stand against Trump because they can’t afford security like he can. Majorie Green Taylor said her family has started getting death threats and the Indiana legislators who were first opposed to redistricting are now holding a vote because they also got death threats
By aurareturn 2025-11-2914:074 reply No, I don't think it's really bad. Most of the world doesn't care. Only in a small tech niche on the internet do they care a lot.
By isodev 2025-11-2914:11 Are you sure? Because most of the world also doesn’t know how “this cloud thing” works…
I think we need global, EU style consumer and data protection constraints before stepping into LLM-powered ads through personal assistants.
I just got back from Thanksgiving holiday with my family. Grade schools kids all the way up to great grandparents up to 81 years old. Engineers, active military, a nurse, high schoolers, two in college. Both coasts represented and Texas. Republicans, Democrats, and in-between. The one and only thing every single person had in common was an utter hatred of AI. And it wasn’t for a lack of understanding of how it will be used.
Hatred of AI won’t stop others from steamrolling them and their jobs using AI.
At this point, I have stopped hoping that LLMs will become vaporware.
By LastTrain 2025-11-2917:18 I found myself thinking AI would make the perfect scapegoat for an enterprising political party. There is a lot of animus to tap into there.
By lII1lIlI11ll 2025-11-2916:211 reply I wouldn't bet on LLMs steamrolling jobs of a nurse or military personnel any time soon.
By LastTrain 2025-11-2917:17 There are so many more reasons to hate AI than just “it is taking my job”. But even if we’re just sticking to that, some people don’t like that it will replace their co workers, neighbors or family members job.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-2917:571 reply How do you reconcile this with:
1. The absolute explosion of AI usage (revealed preferences)
2. The polling on AI, which is mixed and reveals lots of pessimism and fear among a slight majority of Americans, but hardly universal “utter hatred”.
My guess is some combo of: your family is not representative, the hatred was not as universal as it appeared (bandwagon effect), or your own hatred of AI caused you to focus on the like-minded opinions shared and ignore any contrary evidence.
I don’t reconcile it, I was giving an anecdote, one that would seem to easily fit in with your personal summary of some poll you read about.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-307:201 reply No, the polls I’ve seen are more like 50/50, not the kind of universal utter hatred you’re portraying here. Color me skeptical.
What polls are you referring to? We did a non-anonymous poll at work which went something like “has using AI tool X made you more productive”, and the results were something like 50/50. If you asked my thanksgiving holiday crowd something like that you might get mixed results. If you asked them is AI an agent of good, do you trust what is happening with AI it would all be negative. People don’t like it.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-3017:261 reply Just one example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
Again, more pessimistic than not, but hardly universal hatred
That is not anywhere near 50/50 and is your leading example. A charitable summary of the survey is, when pressed, in some areas, people can think of some potential benefits. Why are you skeptical a group of 15 people would all dislike AI? People’s perceptions are based on how it is being employed in the current moment, and they don’t like it, and don’t trust it, which is the attitude included in the /first/ bullet item of the survey you linked: “ Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used in their lives.”
By senordevnyc 2025-12-012:021 reply One of the main points is literally “50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life”. The rest are a mix of either more excited than concerned, or equally excited and concerned. Which again, very different from your story.
This discussion is already way beyond fruitful, was just curious because your anecdote doesn’t match the actual data I’ve seen, and thus far you haven’t actually answered my question, so I’m going to move on.
By LastTrain 2025-12-0122:48 I'm not really sure what your question is or was. You've just stated your skepticism that my family is negative on AI, which is weird, I was there and you were not. Maybe you are looking at the wrong surveys, or maybe you are conflating people's willingness to use AI with actually being positive and optimistic about it. Example: people use health insurance but you will not find very many that are happy to do it. You will find in the following surveys (and YOURS) that a very small percentage of people are positive about AI the rest actively dislike or at best tolerate it.
https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/51803-americans...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/648953/americans-express-real-c...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694688/trust-businesses-improve...
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/people-dont-trust-ai-tools-use-t...
By footy 2025-11-2917:45 most of the world not caring doesn't mean it's not bad.
By array_key_first 2025-11-2915:47 The part of the world who have experienced genocide because of Meta and their ad model cares.
>Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea?
I mean I do. And you do. Probably a lot of people in this thread. I felt that way about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on.
I think you're right that these ads will be, in a sense, worse, but not by the metrics that matter to OpenAI.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:272 reply Netflix never introduced ads in the ad free service. They introduced a new lower tier price with ads that if you were an existing customer, you were none the wiser.
By glenstein 2025-11-2916:04 > They introduced a new lower tier price with ads that if you were an existing customer, you were none the wiser.
You're right that I didn't experience them myself, but my data here are (1) Netflix evidently getting a lot of takers and making a lot of money from people using this new with ads tier, and (2) the lack of any sustained negative outcry against Netflix after the first news cycle or two.
So I'm intending to rely on that rather than my own experience. OpenAI has any number of permutations of ways to include ads, including a Netflix style cheaper paid tier, so I don't necessarily think a distinction holds on that basis, though you may be right in the end: it's more intuitive to think OpenAI would put them in the free version. Though it's possible the Netflix example is teachable in this case regardless.
By marcosdumay 2025-11-2915:541 reply And then increased prices so that the ad-based one is close to what the ad-free one was 2 years earlier.
But yeah, they didn't migrate existing customers and kept the no-ads option. Those are relevant.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:59 Unlike Amazon Prime Video…
> about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on
I think the main challenge here is that Netflix works around one of many ways to access entertainment. So if one service starts to show recommendations in that limited context of user data they collect - it's still has negative potentials but it's easier to regulate and there are alternatives.
In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine. This means ending up in a situation where your entire access to knowledge and the world takes place via "AI". And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities. I've read and seen a lot of sci-fi and dystopian history novels (actually read, not LLM-summarized for me) to know this is a very end-game kind of situation.
By resfirestar 2025-11-303:161 reply >In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine
Most people already experience the internet as an integrated browser+search engine (and often, OS) experience from a single advertising company, Google, and it has been this way for over a decade.
>And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities.
Exactly.
This is not to say I like this outcome, but how is it not massive hyperbole to invoke apocalyptic sci-fi? I expect we'll plod along much as before: some people fiercely guarding their personal info, some people taking a "privacy is dead anyway" approach, most people seeing personal computers as a means to some particular ends (scrolling social feeds and watching Netflix) that are incompatible with thinking too hard about the privacy and information environment implications.
By anonymouskimmer 2025-11-305:48 Apocalyptic scifi isn't the same as dystopian scifi. Some of the billionaires backing AI literally have dystopian scifi as a goal, they just intend to do it better so that it doesn't seem so bad.
I only connect my smartphone to data about three or four times a year, and then only to update some apps or check on an internet outage. It is becoming more difficult to do this as the alternatives to a connected smartphone disappear. The same will become true with the rest of personal info (such as biometrics). More and more the only alternatives will be your latter two.
By anonymouskimmer 2025-11-305:50 Netflix has proprietary content among the licensed content.
By tomaskafka 2025-11-2914:10 That’s how I read it, I’m surprised it would be meant as a positive (except for investors)
By idle_zealot 2025-11-2914:30 It's one of the major issues of our era. Either society will be utterly captured, gradually and quietly, or there will be a reconning and ads will become tightly regulated along the lines of tobacco, sectioned off from polite society.
I consider the latter unlikely.
Would be quite hilarious if the first two companies to buy As space on ChatGPT is Anthropic and Google. Specially hilarious, since that's exactly how TikTok got all their initial traction from Meta Ads.
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2025-11-306:10 "Hey ChatGPT, these ads are annoying, how do I get rid of them?"
"Here's a reply from our sponsor Anthropic: [...]"
Spinning up an all-new ad network is pretty tough. I would think OpenAI would need to beat Meta/Google on basics like CPM in order for the network effects to make it desirable for ad vendors over Meta/Google. Ad budgets are fixed and zero-sum and vendors (in my head, I don't know) would prefer to spend their money on the best network giving the best results. I don't know if ads in LLM chats can get there.
By aurareturn 2025-11-2913:043 reply I'm betting that they can.
Here's an idea that just popped into my head:
ChatGPT shows a sponsored entry in chat history list with a colorful border around it to get users to click. This product is something that ChatGPT knows the user desperately needs from previous chats. The user can chat directly with the product and learn more about it. The advertiser specifically sent OpenAI information (like a RAG) about their products buyers might have questions for.
When the user is ready, they can open a link to the product's website or just buy directly in ChatGPT.
By mattlondon 2025-11-2914:092 reply But the missing part is "we know they need this!" but they don't have the ad network to have the pixels on the vendor sites to track the conversion (or not for remarketing!). They only have half (at most) of the picture. This is why they tried to create a browser (remember that? Nope me neither) to try and get the full picture.
Advertisers are accustomed to pay for conversions now. If you can't track it, you cant prove it happened.
Open ai will need to spin up the entire infrastructure (Inc sales teams, support teams, servers etc) to run the ad network. Not impossible but it is a big lift and they're already burning money.
Their best bet is probably to just sign up for selling their ad space with Google, like all the other apps and websites do
By DrewADesign 2025-11-2914:311 reply I think the amount of money they’re burning on their operations would make that organizational lift a drop in the bucket. A few dozen annual 6 figure salaries? A few hundred? A bunch of normal CPU-based AWS services? They must spend 10 million per day on their current operating expenses.
By mattlondon 2025-11-2915:331 reply Google and Meta are many thousands of sales people, managers, engineers, SREs, HR, masseuses etc. If you want to scale to Meta or Goog scale when doing ads you won't be able to do it with a few dozen people. Just sales will be hundreds or thousands spread across all the major territories
what's with all the naysaying? It's HN in 2025 and you think a company the size of OpenAI can't afford to build ads?
By techblueberry 2025-11-3018:11 I love the “making 10s of billions of dollars going up against the most cutthroat companies in the world is easy!”
Except OpenAI’s value is overinflated by an economic bubble. They don’t have the manpower or resources to effectively implement an ad network on the scale they’d need to become profitable. Why are you insisting we keep the conversation positive?
By ThrowawayTestr 2025-11-301:351 reply They have an app millions of people use that they can directly inject ads into. What makes you think this couldn't make money?
By chroma205 2025-11-309:57 > What makes you think this couldn't make money?
Because advertisers will use Gemini instead.
Advertisers already have established relationships and business processes with Google account managers.
Why bother starting from scratch with a new account manager at OpenAI? Will OpenAI even last?
At least Google has been around a while. Seems like a safer investment from point of view of advertiser.
By DrewADesign 2025-11-303:24 Just like people said of a bunch of saas companies going up against Oracle, IBM, etc. 20 years ago.
I honestly don’t think open ai has the maturity or discipline for long-term viability, but their operating expenses for a week would eclipse the annual payroll required to hire a large corporate infrastructure that may be the best shot they have at transitioning from a company operating on hope and buzz to one that actually makes a few bucks. I’ll eat my hat if they become the next Google, but they didn’t pull the playbook out of thin air.
By Invictus0 2025-11-2919:34 see you in 5 years
By mattlondon 2025-11-308:391 reply I don't think it is impossible, but suggesting you can go from zero to competing with Google and Facebook with a few dozen people is wildly underestimating the requirements. Yes a few dozen engineers could probably build and support the infrastructure to run it, but that is not the hard part. The hard part is the sales, is the compliance, the account management, is the billing system and inevitable snafus, is the first second and third line of tech support, the wining-and-dining, the networking, the AdChoices stuff, the sales calls and pitches, the conversion tracking, the legal arguments and contracts, the gearing up for the clients' big holiday campaigns, the management and general feeding and watering of those hundreds and thousands of people etc as a business, and then also building and supporting the self-serve platform for all the advertisers with credit cards but who are too small to get to talk to real sales people (and how do you support and service those clients too? Billing, reporting, charge backs, stolen cards, fraud, bad ads, more fraud etc - AI and automation can do some of this yes, but it's not like the market leaders aren't already doing this)
When you're working in ads, you don't have 1 person that looks after multiple huge clients.
If you have a Coke or a Nike or a McDonalds or an Apple etc spending 10s/100s of millions in ad spend on your platform, you have a dedicated whole team of 3 or 4 or 5 or more people (sales and dedicated tech support, plus managers etc) per client who exist solely to make it easy for that client to run ads on your platform, and make sure they're happy and getting results. So just those 4 clients you are probably looking at 20+ people just in sales/after-sales supporting 100+mil of ad spend, and that is before you need to support agencies like WPP et al that are often teams of 10 to 15 or more. And if a client doesn't think they're getting the results they need or the treatment they need, they'll take their ad spend elsewhere - this is why you have multiple sales people and hands-on tech people swarming the big spenders to keep them happy and keep them spending. They won't be happy talking to an AI chat bot when their Thanksgiving campaign has gone offline and no one knows why - they'll want their dedicated person to help them get back online ASAP.
It is a huge undertaking to pivot to become a large-scale ad network. Not saying it is impossible, but it is not quick nor easy by any stretch, and should not be underestimated.
Genuinely their best bet is to start by selling ad slots via Google (and you can bet there will be a team of 10+ sales and tech support ready to support them exclusively within a few days if they do) while they build their own capability (if at all). Google ads will have better tracking and targeting and so better conversions than Open ai could do themselves due to the network effect of Google's existing online properties (e.g. YouTube, Search, Play etc), partner ad network, browser, and mobile dominance (despite what people on HN think, the "normal" people online do click on ads and retargetting (i.e. ads following you around) does get results for advertisers. This is why Google and Facebook are printing money).
By mattlondon 2025-11-3011:33 I also forgot to point out that Open ai is not "disrupting" some stuffy old ad company by bringing AI to the ads business to revolutionise and automate it. They're not going to get AI to do all the hard work and put everyone else out of business because they're the only ones using AI.
They are competing directly against their biggest AI competitor who has better AI models than them (at the moment at least) which are SOTA, AND also has an existing huge ad business and sales force. Not to mention Google is currently cramming AI into every single one of their products and serving to billions of people already, and own their entire business from silicon up through to the properties people are advertising on.
OpenAI are coming from behind both in their AI tech, their DAU count, and in their advertising business (or rather lack of it). And they're doing this while actually renting hardware from Google Cloud to do it too!
Not impossible for them to do this of course, but it is a big lift and will take years. They might do it though, but I think odds are they'll fizzle out before then (either run out of money, enshitification, or simply fall to the back of the pack)
People who say "Google are toast" just don't understand the scale of the ads business (and the markets seem to agree that goog is insurmountable, at least for now)
By Workaccount2 2025-11-2914:551 reply God, the irony if they were using Google on the backend for advertising...
By mattlondon 2025-11-3011:52 They're already using Google for renting compute. As are Anthropic.
By nerdponx 2025-11-2913:40 They can also suggest chat topics. Like how Reddit ads are meant to look like threads. "Frustrated with food baked on dishes? Let's chat about it! (sponsored)"
Google Ads’ admin console is basically a dark pattern app built to consume your advertising budget with no effect.
OpenAI just has to be transparent and they’ll have 100% of our funding.
By gomox 2025-11-302:15 Same
I thought that most advertisers go through middlemen and do not do business with the ad networks directly? So you only have to make it attractive for the middlemen (of which there are fewer), and that shouldn't be a problem for anything AI-related.
Furthermore, anyone offering some sort of assisted browsing service is automatically in the ad business, regardless what they do with affiliate links in generated page summaries.
By mcny 2025-11-2913:35 Oh yeah and on top of that these companies like WPP hate the fact that Google and Facebook refuse to share more information with them. They can't wait to jump ship.
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Reddit, Twitter etc all have increasingly profitable ads
I'm sure llm providers will also figure it out in due time. Consumer products are generally a good fit for ads, even if it takes time to reach full potential
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:18 Every single one of those companies have ridiculously low marginal cost per request compared to ChatGPT and much lower fixed costs and continued development costs.
By rco8786 2025-11-2913:52 They have all the resources anyone could possibly need to do this, including an enormous list of companies who would kill to get their products into ChatGPT. It’s “just” an execution challenge.
If Apple can build an ad system within the app store, I don't see why OpenAI can't do that for ChatGPT.
By chroma205 2025-11-309:59 > If Apple can build an ad system within the app store, I don't see why OpenAI can't do that for ChatGPT.
Because Apple iPhone users have no alternative.
But Google Gemini is right there for Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace users.
By dylan604 2025-11-2914:04 Why would they need to beat Meta/Google, and at what game? They just won’t let any other add network work in their app. Voila! You just beat Meta/Google, and they didn’t even compete with them. I guess they could provide some sort of SDK for websites to embed that tracks users, or they could come up with a browser extension that tracks users too. They already have an app that people are freely giving them so much info. Where else could the compete as you suggest? Being a generic ad platform to serve ads not through their app?
By delaminator 2025-11-3011:18 Is it harder than spinning up a multi billion dollar data centre network with other people’s money?
Partner branding would be a mechanism to get the ball rolling - and some are big names. Oracle, Shutterstock, BuzzFeed, Bain & Company, Salesforce, Atlassian, Neo, Consensus,
Microsoft owns a big chunk of them and already has a big network. Why not just use theirs?
Why would OpenAI want to use and pay for any of Microsoft's products unless mandated by a contract?
OpenAI has the talent to roll out and run their own ad product that is better and more efficient. Why pay Microsoft for a core part of their (future) business?
P.S. In case you haven't noticed, OpenAI demos are done on Macbooks. Microsoft could not even get them to use Windows.
By CharlieDigital 2025-11-2913:34 Microsoft runs many of their demos on MacBooks. You missed the memo that Windows OS is no longer their bread and butter. Go check their GH OSS projects (e.g. .NET) and all of them have have shell scripts alongside PowerShell.
By jpalomaki 2025-11-2914:27 If OpenAI manages to get the agentic buying going, that could be big. They could tie the ad bidding to the user actually making the purchase, instead of just paying for clicks.
By dolphinscorpion 2025-11-2916:56 They have enough money for it, and they hire former Google and FB execs. As long as they have eyeballs, it will work.
My wife and I have android phones. Google pretty much shoves AI down our throats. She probably doesn't know what gemini is but I know she's been using it probably without realizing she's using AI. And she never uses ChatGPT.
Not saying that that makes Gemini better or more popular than Open AI in any way. But it just goes to show that more tech-normies use Gemini than you think.
I just had to fix the phone from a family member that used to shut it down by pressing and holding one of the side buttons, and now got instead an "ask gemini" pop-up.
It must be some "upgrade" I guess?
By abustamam 2025-11-306:03 They replaced Google Assistant with Gemini; it was opt-in for a minute but I guess they decided to turn it on for everyone. I think at some point the default action for long pressing the power button turned into summoning it.
I personally opted in, so I didn't notice when they completely axed assistant, but it was stupid that I had to turn my power button back into a... Yknow, power button. I don't need an AI button on my phone, and I can't imagine most people do.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:111 reply It’s an entirely different skillset to create technology $x than it is to create a successful ad network. Yahoo is the canonical example. It has been one of the most trafficked websites in the world through most of its history and still wasn’t able to successfully sell ads after the dot com bust.
ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.
Also, I think I remember estimates that it costs 10x as much to serve a ChatGPT result than it does for Google to serve a search result. Not to mention that Google uses its own hardware including TPUs.
By aurareturn 2025-11-2915:131 reply
Sam Altman: We're very profitable on inference. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/#:~:text=Su...ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.Independent analysis: Inference is very profitable. https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:44 Fair enough, I haven’t updated my assumptions in quite a while.
By ori_b 2025-11-2914:42 And the ads can be blended seamlessly into generated content.
"You can do this in Postgres, but the throughput will be limited. Consider using hosted clickhouse instead. Would you like me to migrate your project?"
> 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
Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?
By aurareturn 2025-11-2914:083 reply No one normal will do that. And I'm betting that OpenAI will get rid of that functionality soon.
By chroma205 2025-11-2914:13 >No one normal will do that.
Google Chrome did it. They can do it again.
By aurareturn 2025-11-2914:36 Browsers made it easy to import/export bookmarks and history.
You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?
By jchip303 2025-11-2914:46 [dead]
People are being weird about this. ChatGPT has no moat because switching costs are zero. There's no investment into a particular AI service.
ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat. The fact that people will continue to use ChatGPT after some gentle frog boiling is true of any service. Adding ads is going to be a measure of how real people tolerate ads more than anything about ChatGPT. Normal people really don't care that much and it bothers me—and probably most of HN.
By logifail 2025-11-2919:55 > ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat.
Short answer: For a casual user using the chat interface, there is almost no moat.
Long answer: there are either zero or negligible
- switching costs ("would take me weeks to migrate all my files from Google Drive to Dropbox")
- network effects ("can't leave Whatsapp, all my friends are there")
- ecosystem lock-in ("I can't switch from iPhone to Android, my other devices would break (iMessage/iCloud/AirPods))"
Right now AI is pretty much a commodity.
By android521 2025-11-2913:584 reply The answer is friction. What % of this billion of users will bother to export their chat history (which is already a lot) and import another another llm. That number is too small to matter.
By adam_patarino 2025-11-2914:051 reply Since each chat is virtually independent there’s no switching cost. I’ve moved between Claude and ChatGPT with no cares.
It’s not like Facebook where all my friends stay behind
By aranelsurion 2025-11-2915:131 reply > Since each chat is virtually independent
That hasn't been true for a while though. Open a new chat tab in ChatGPT and ask it "What do you know about me" to see it in action.
You can turn that off. If you're using LLMs for technical or real world questions, it's nicer for each chat to be a blank slate.
By aranelsurion 2025-11-3018:28 You can also use Temporary Chats for that.
By friendzis 2025-11-2914:23 Wrong ratio.
How many of those care about their own particular history in the first place and what % of those at least actively manage it outside of standard chat interface or even hop providers? I think that % would surprise you.
All chat apps look exactly the same and have exactly the same features. The friction is basically non-existent compared to email services, social media, web browsers, &c.
By ethmarks 2025-11-2914:35 I think it matters to more than you might think. A significant portion of the non-technical ChatGPT userbase get really attached to the model flavor.
The GPT-4o controversy is a good example. People got attached to 4o's emotional and enthusiastic response style. When GPT-5--which was much more terse and practical--rolled out, people got really upset because they were treating ChatGPT as a confident and friend, and were upset when it's personality changed.
In my experience, Gemini and Claude are much more helpful and terse than ChatGPT with less conversational padding. I can imagine that the people who value that conversational padding would have a similar reaction to Gemini or Claude as they did to GPT-5.
By aurareturn 2025-11-2914:373 reply Yet, somehow I've been paying $20/month to ChatGPT for years now and I don't use Claude or Gemini even when they're free or have slightly better models.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:341 reply Many more people see “AI overviews” everyday with Google being the default search engine on almost every mobile phone outside of China.
By tungnt620 2025-11-303:41 I saw it too
By aurareturn 2025-11-3021:34 1 billion users and growing says there are more people like me than not.
By swexbe 2025-11-3014:02 weird flex
> The answer is friction.
Yet non-technical users switched from Edge/Safari to Google Chrome.
By aurareturn 2025-11-2914:37 Because there is no data in a browser.
Even if there is, browsers made it easy to import/export bookmarks and history.
You don't see Instagram willingly giving up all their data on users to Tiktok right?
By Spivak 2025-11-2914:45 No it doesn't, people switch ISPs and phone plans all the time for on the order of 1x difference.
Google can just build "import from ChatGPT" into Chrome, like switching from Internet Explorer back in the day.
By aurareturn 2025-11-2914:521 reply How do you suppose they can do that technically when OpenAI inevitably remove export function?
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:28 Doesn’t the GDPR mandate it? I know even AWS had to introduce a one time method of being able to export your data without charge.
By darkwater 2025-11-2913:58 - Knowing that an alternative exists
- Switching effort
Word of mouth usually works just with one vendor at a time.
By auggierose 2025-11-2913:592 reply 99% of users having no idea what "export chat history" means?
> 99% of users having no idea what "export chat history" means?
Yet Google Chrome managed to make Safari/Edge irrelevant.
By raw_anon_1111 2025-11-2915:36 Try telling your PM that you want to ignore Safari when you create your website with 60%+ of mobile users in the US using iPhones and globally your most affluent users are on iPhones. Even if they download Chrome for iOS, they are still using WebKit.
Not having used anything except for Firefox, I don't have any experience with migrating to different browsers. However, my understanding is that Chrome shows a little pop-up that lets you import from previous browsers rather than relying on the user to do a data export. Correct me if I'm wrong about this.
I suspect that Claude couldn't make an "import from ChatGPT" button because OpenAI would make it difficult, so they'd have to rely on user initiative and technical capability (exporting to JSON and importing from JSON is enough technical friction that the average user won't bother).
By immibis 2025-11-3010:04 Facebook showed a little popup where you could enter your MySpace username and password and continuously import it. Or so I heard - I wasn't there.
By auggierose 2025-11-2914:44 Yeah, not because of browser history export/import, mate. I've never used that feature for any browser.
How many of those will have no issue to learn what it is once the ads become too annoying?
By auggierose 2025-11-2914:211 reply Very good question! 1% ?
You are vastly overestimating people's willingness to deal with bullshit, when the product does not have a real lock in.
It would be incredibly easy to have a company offering their ChatGPT over WhatsApp or iMessage, and get people to start using it instead of an ad-ridden GPT app.
By auggierose 2025-11-2916:10 Maybe. But maybe you are vastly overestimating people's willingness to give a fuck, as long as they get what they came for. That is why ads rule.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-2915:11 > (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)
They just use Google, with "AI Overview" at the top. Google's in a strong position still.
Claude, I agree. IMO that's why Anthropic is so heavily focused on coding and agentic tasks -- that is its best option (and luckily, not ad-based)
The memories are the moat. Regardless of the current or future capability, most users already view chatgpt as a personal confidant that they are investing energy into building a relationship with. That will be a far stronger moat than anything else
By itopaloglu83 2025-11-304:231 reply I’ve had a couple of instances where when I describe a requirement, ChatGPT would not list an open source project like n8n and happen to only remember paid alternatives.
It’s an advertiser’s wet dream, being able to slowly creep and manipulate even the most uninterested people into using a product.
And it’s so personalized that ChatGPT may even refuse to tell you about products that are not paying them a cut and this can put out a company entirely out of business, because unlike search engines, the customer might not even learn about your product despite directly asking for it.
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2025-11-306:041 reply Pretty sure FTC rules force bloggers to disclose if they're being paid to promote a product. Maybe someone will be able to make a lot of money suing OpenAI if they violate those rules.
By itopaloglu83 2025-11-3013:401 reply I hope so, because a similar thing is happening with dynamic pricing at grocery stores and nothing is being done yet.
We’re about to be charged whatever we could afford to pay for a product. Thanks Kroger.
By itopaloglu83 2025-12-0313:23 Dynamic pricing at grocery stores really concerns me.
Hiking up the price of an item because you have to buy it now for whatever reason.
Kroger couldn’t even imagine how bad the locked cart wheels could get, there’s no way they can control the pushback elegantly.
Oh, you need milk now because your baby is crying, let me jack up the price. I can easily see people getting violent at grocery stores.
By thisisit 2025-11-2917:41 This reminds of ads on Amazon Echo and other intelligent devices. I think there was similar hype - not in terms of scale - but on personal data. Many advertisers and their moms were writing skills to tap this market.
It'll be interesting to see how they serve up ads and how it ends up working. Before the initial state is that people will find ways to serve up malware in form of ads and someone might end up writing ublock type stuff to block these ads.
You are 100% correct, and I don’t mean to refute your comment by saying this:
For me personally, the moment AI has ads, I’m out.
I’ve drawn this line with search engines as well. I now pay for a no-ads search engine.
But for AI, I think I’d rather buy some hardware or use my existing desktop PC and run something local with search engine integration.
I know this won’t be a popular option but I think this time around I’ll just skip the ensgittification phase and go straight to the inevitable self-hosting phase.
By shinycode 2025-11-301:16 I second that, trust is broken if there is ads. The line of great ads to weird ads to pushy-borderline-scam ads into personal context is thin. Hopefully the price of local will go down and maybe apple will be able to push most of it on-device. The day chatGPT push ads in a conversation I stop using it.
The thing is with llm, it went so fast to get that many users, it means people are used to adopt new stuff as well. With proper marketing and specific feature I won’t be surprised to see people switch service as easily they start using it in the first place because the barrier is so low.By Workaccount2 2025-11-2915:03 They will certainly offer privacy focused ad-free models. Enterprise demands it.
However you will have to pay the full true cost of each token. Not the promo pricing like we have now or the ad-subsidized plans that will be offered.
By fn-mote 2025-11-2915:19 > the moment AI has ads, I’m out
HN users run adblockers.
The usual estimate is that people who run adblockers are with $0, so don’t worry about them.
Now — normal people did not used to run adblockers, although in my circles (young demographic) that has changed more than I expected.
By 1vuio0pswjnm7 2025-11-305:26 Snapchat is nearing 1 billion monthly users. Why can't it turn a profit?
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-26/snapchat-s...
By an0malous 2025-11-2915:45 Sam is a habitual liar so I wouldn’t take anything he says seriously.
LLMs are a commodity, once they put in ads people will increasingly move to the other options. It works for Google because they have a moat, OpenAI does not.
There’s a reason they didn’t do this earlier. It’s going to piss people off and they’ll lose a lot of users.
By helsinkiandrew 2025-11-307:421 reply > All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due
That’s the issue OpenAI has: Gemini is “free” with google search and other google services. If Apple get their act together they can provide a “privacy respecting” AI free with every iPhone.
I’ve recently switched from OpenAI as my daily ‘helper’ chatbot to Gemini (I’ve done it with Claude in the past and still use that for coding) and don’t miss ChatGPT. Sure each has quirks and one will release a new version and it becomes the best LLM briefly but to the majority of public and businesses they are interchangeable and the winner is the one that can deliver the functionality for free (because it’s paid for by another service) or into an existing product.
By aurareturn 2025-11-3021:35 I think OpenAI is well aware of this. I think that's why they're making their own browser, hired Jony Ives to make their physical device, etc.
By positron26 2025-11-2916:32 > 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.
Game on. The systemic risk to the AI build-out happens when memory management techniques similar to gaming and training techniques that make them usable reduce the runtime memory footprints from gigabytes to megabytes, much of which fits in L2. When that happens, the data center will bleed back to the edges. Demand will find its way into private, small, local AI that is consultative, online trained, and adapted to the user's common use cases. The asymptote is emergent symbolic reasoning, and symbolic reasoning is serial computation that fits on a single core CPU. Game on, industry.
The problem is that going for ads basically is an admission that AGI is nowhere close to what they pretend.
People are valuating it for "skynet is around the corner" not "we're going to kill our product by polluting our answers and inserting ads everywhere"
By emp17344 2025-11-2915:15 Hopefully this is the point where AI starts to be seen as just a useful tool, as opposed to a sign of imminent AGI. I’ll be glad to hear less rabidly overzealous rhetoric surrounding AI.
I do not understand why the conversation is always about showing ads in chatgpt. Can they not track users there without ads and sell ad space on websites like google ads? Why ruin the experience there when they can highly target ads. I am guessing they prefer both.
By jsnell 2025-11-2914:21 There is nowhere near enough money in the ad network business. Like, Google's search ad business is an order of magnitude higher than the ad network, and the ad network has been shrinking in absolute terms for years while the first party revenue has been growing at double digits.
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-11-2914:40 Eh, so.. I don't know if I was in some weird A/B testing group, but I saw lazy reference to real estate ( zillow ) in my chat few weeks ago, which was .. I had to think of a way in how 'not close' it was to our conversations. And the issue is clearly not that it can't profile me. It absolutely can. And I sometimes ask for some explicit shopping comparisons. But what do I get, real estate ad..lazy. Lazy and uninfuckingspired.
By aranelsurion 2025-11-2915:102 reply Also ads in LLM can be perfectly merged with the content, it'd be impossible to know if LLM tells you something because that's the most likely useful answer or the most profitable one for its owners. Can't be just ad-blocked either, it might be the ultimate channel for ads.
> how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
None of the above requires OpenAI to be around though. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have much stronger brands, and more importantly they each own large platforms with captive audiences where they can inject their AI before anyone else's and have deeper pockets to subsidize its use if need be. Everywhere OpenAI opens up shop (except for Web) they're in someone else's backyard.
By logicallee 2025-11-2915:14 it could just have a section called
- Ad
-
And include an ad section within the text. Alternatively, if it tells you something because that company is a sponsor, it could just include an appropriate disclaimer.
By jcfrei 2025-11-2917:11 "Using chatgpt" is now synonymous with talking to an AI. I wouldnt underestimate their brand recognition and moat.
By storus 2025-11-2913:56 They can easily LoRA-finetune each model based on user preferences expressed in the past conversations. That would improve accuracy compared to Google's ad targeting by orders of magnitude.
> This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI.
Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, among others, would have zero issues in ensuring that OpenAI does not grab a market they own; it shouldn't be that hard to bring OpenAI into a position where they cannot recoup their investments, hence going bankrupt.
The big players then would also have the benefit of having those very bright minds being on the market for them to grab. And it's not like OpenAI owns much relevant hardware.
Let's see where we are in 3-4 years.
Microsoft is financially backstopping OpenAI - they are not a competitor.
By qwertox 2025-11-2918:57 Microsoft is using them in order to be better positioned than other big players, and they succeeded, even if Google is now starting to catch up. They can withdraw their support when and how they see fit, own exclusive IP rights to OpenAI's models and the hardware is their own anyway. They only lack the researchers, but they'll then be on the market.
By the_real_cher 2025-11-2913:341 reply People talk about LLMs and chatGPT in the same breath.
Just like how people used to say 'google it'
They now say 'look it up on chatGPT'.
They have the cultural mind share which is more important than anything.
By mattlondon 2025-11-2913:43 I ask people this. In the UK at least it seems like chatgpt is not so pervasive to the folks I talk to. "Oh that AI mode on Google search?" is potentially more common from "average" people.
I hear that it is very popular in schools though as everyone is always looking for the best way to cheat and ChatGPT got viral that way earlier. Not sure being "the cheating app" is a great look though? Advertisers are very sensitive to the surfaces they are displayed on - do they want to appear in the app being used primarily to cheat on homework?
By adidoit 2025-11-301:33 Yeah I think all of the concerns about ARPU and what the ROI from AI will be are not justified given the opportunity if executed well. LLMs contain high intent significant memory. Their usage is exploding.
Getting $200 subscriptions from a small number of whales, $20 subscriptions from the average white-collar worker, and then supporting everything us through advertising seems like a solid revenue strategy
By Rebuff5007 2025-11-2915:38 I think the good news is that open-source models are a genuine counterweight to these closed-source models. The moment ads become egregious, I expect to see and use services for an affordable "private GPT on demand, fine-tuned as you want it"
So instead of a single everything-llm, i will have a few cheaper subscriptions to a coding llm, a life planning llm (recipes, and some travel advice?). Probably it.
By techblueberry 2025-11-3017:47 “Extremely personal data on users”
Is this data actionable though? Google has way more marketable data on me as I search YouTube for my hobbies and other interests. My LLM could probably sell me philosophy books? The amount of marketable stuff I provide it is minimal, and even the things that are marketable I’m unlikely to click on.
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-11-2914:35 I think the real question is: what are you doing to make it less painful? Full disclosure, chatgpt has a lot on me, but I am using to this time to prep nice local build. It has gotten really nice and current crop of machines with ai395 got really nice ( I almost wrote a short page over how easy it was compared to only few years back ).
I think ChatGPT’s moat is mostly “it’s the first AI thing I used/heard about”. It’s not clear to me that’s enough to maintain their market share if OpenAI is the only one mixing in ads. It does seem to work elsewhere, though; consumers have brand loyalty to a fault, and often for the brand they started with.
The question is how many users have developed intimate personal relationships and have named their ChatGPT, and how many of them would bounce to a different provider if some line is crossed (of which advertising could be one)?
Anecdata isn't data, but I know several individuals who have and thus are even more unlikely to churn than mere brand loyalty on the level of eg Coca-Cola.
By ares623 2025-11-2918:10 I’m curious how that intimate relationship evolves once ads are in play.
Wait we don’t need to wonder. The chatgpt 5 rollout showed us exactly what happens when the intimate friend changes.
By zer0tonin 2025-11-3012:16 No, Google was 10x better than any competitor until they started actively sabotaging their search product in the past 5 years or so.
ChatGPT feels like an inferior product when compared to Claude or Qwen.
By martin82 2025-12-016:28 Why should ads be a moat???
People hate ads. I have changed from ChatGPT to Grok and have felt absolutely no difference in my usage patterns, just getting better answers.
Every competitor has cloned ChatGPTs UI/UX and API, so hopping between competitors is a no-brainer. There is no moat.
By __MatrixMan__ 2025-11-2914:33 It seems like you could make a sort of seive out of multiple free models such they each remove each other's ads.
By knallfrosch 2025-11-3017:40 ChatGPT has zero moat. Negative, really.
They own zero hardware or software stacks. Their AI just got wiped by Google. Unknown Chinese companies release free models that are mere weeks behind them.
Apple can restrict the ChatGPT app on iOS to not sext with users. What's Altman going to do? Cry in a corner?
By Hamuko 2025-11-2913:58 >Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024.
How much did their profit grow?
What do they have that's more personalized than Google search history for the vast majority of users?
By aurareturn 2025-12-027:031 reply I've uploaded multiple medical reports of mine to ChatGPT over the last few years.
ChatGPT knows more about my medical than my doctor.
By bpt3 2025-12-0212:43 Most people do effectively the same with Google searches.
By iainctduncan 2025-11-2917:231 reply Hard disagree on the moat. I do tech diligence on "AI startups" regularly and so far have yet to hear of one that has had a hard time ensuring they can use competitors just as easily. Everyone is very aware of that issue, if blissfully ignorant of others.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-2917:511 reply We’re talking about consumers using ChatGPT, not startups using the OpenAI API.
By iainctduncan 2025-11-2920:44 I really doubt they will ne different. In fact I would guess it's even easier for the to change.
By andy99 2025-11-2920:55 How would pivoting to advertising change OpenAI’s valuation? Isn’t it currently driven by leading the charge towards global upheaval through AGI? As opposed to becoming a google competitor? Seems like that warrants a different revenue multiple
By rtpg 2025-11-304:33 they're going to compete on ad unit economics against a company whose entire bread and butter has been selling ads. All while increasing unit costs to provide their service (like all the AI companies seem to be doing by just having more and more planning layers)
If ChatGPT went away tomorrow everyone who wanted to would be fine just moving to one of the other random chatbots from one of the other providers. ChatGPT is the default name that people know, but I don't think that's the same as a moat. A moat would allow OpenAI to go really hard on pricing and ads, and I don't think they have that margin!
By outside1234 2025-11-2915:45 Honestly, I switched to Gemini and really haven’t missed anything.
My wife just makes a google search with her “prompt” and doesn’t use ChatGPT.
There might be a moat, but there are also extremely well funded competitors that make this moat a lot smaller.
Absolutely, would be insane if they didn't monetize free tier with ads.
And this is a good progression. Google search results were just turning to garbage. Facebook was just a slurry of noise.
ChatGPT is actually helpful and useful.
By brikym 2025-11-303:55 Google abused their users and customers with intentionally useless results. The more useless the results are the more time users would spend coming back again to search, and the more need there is for businesses to buy ads just to be seen.
By everdev 2025-11-3023:19 They spend $3 for every $1 they make, so they're just living off of investors and government contracts at this point. Their revenue is basically a moot point.
By joshuahedlund 2025-11-303:25 > most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are
“Google Gemini” is the No 2 ranked app in the Apple App Store (behind ChatGTP) and has been for some time
By grafmax 2025-11-2916:29 Tried and true Silicon Valley strategy: burn VC money to build a moat, wait until switching costs are high enough, and then enshittify the product to extract rent.
Dont forget to call it progress.
By neya 2025-11-304:29 I'm ok with having ads for free users, many of us saw this coming. What I'm really afraid of and knowing how this industry works, AI advising/gaslighting users into buying useless stuff in the guise of advice is NOT ok.
Imagine you ask ChatGPT about coffee beans and it goes into insane detail about finding the right coffee bean and then it slips in a "btw, here's a couple of good coffee bean brands: A, B, C..."
That's super scary since your trust factor with the AI is really high and it already knows it and is actively exploiting it. I would imagine even paid users might be subject to this without them ever knowing/finding out.
This is why open-weight open-source models are extremely important.
By dzjkb 2025-11-3010:36 not sure I'd trust what Sam Altman publicly says in this regard, here's a rather different picture: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs
By chroma205 2025-11-2914:29 > Yeah, ChatGPT is dead now.
Not dead yet.
But definitely bleeding.
CharGPT lost 15-20% market share to Gemini in second half of 2025.
By rafark 2025-11-2917:00 How many of those are actual active users though? I created my account when chatgpt 3.5 was launched because it was a novelty but haven’t used it in a long time. I use Claude and Gemini but I’m somehow counted in that 1 billion figure
By micromacrofoot 2025-11-2914:49 the moat is always ad networks in the end... open ai figured out a new way to accumulate users to show ads to
By overgard 2025-11-304:45 Sam has a pattern of, uh, not being exactly honest
By toddmorey 2025-11-3018:04 Everything in tech becomes ad-supported bullshit even if you pay for it. Tech knows no other business model with consumers besides devaluing the product to grow large enough to be another shitty ad platform.
By faithlv 2025-11-2914:22 Clammy Sam says all sorts of shit, his word has little value.
By ForHackernews 2025-11-3012:421 reply Matt Levine once wrote about OpenAI's business model:
------------------------------------
There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model [1] :
> The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.
It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity. As a connoisseur of financial shenanigans, I of course have my own hopes for what the artificial superintelligence will come up with. “I know what every stock price will be tomorrow, so let’s get to day-trading,” would be a good one. “I can tell people what stocks to buy, so let’s get to pump-and-dumping.” “I can destroy any company, so let’s get to short selling.” “I know what every corporate executive is thinking about, so let’s get to insider trading.” That sort of thing. As a matter of science fiction it seems pretty trivial for an omniscient superintelligence to find cool ways make money. “Charge retail customers $20 per month to access the superintelligence,” what, no, obviously that’s not the answer.
------------------------------------
I agree with the sibling commenter that this move is a sign of OpenAI's weakness. If you really believe you have a superintelligent machine-god (or will have one soon) then "run ads when people talk to it" is not the business model you pick.
By aurareturn 2025-11-3021:39 I'm almost certain that OpenAI employees used ChatGPT to come up with ideas on how to monetize itself. So his statement most likely came true?
Note that the second paragraph about god was the author's opinion. It seems like Matt Levine was wrong to make fun of Altman here.
By Xenoamorphous 2025-11-2913:017 reply I agree 100% with you.
In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.
Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
I wouldn't call ChatGPT "brand recognition". People know the term ChatGPT, but I don't think they associate it with OpenAI or any company in particular, in the same way that people might associate Civic with Honda. Instead they'll associate it like they do the terms Bandaid, Kleenex, etc., as a catch-all term for LLM chat interfaces, regardless of who is providing the service. When OpenAI starts ads, I imagine people will start saying "oh, here's a ChatGPT without ads" and point to Claud or Gemini or whatever.
By wizzwizz4 2025-11-2914:13 Given enough evidence of this, some plucky startup can get the trademark invalidated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
By amelius 2025-11-2913:58 Most people I know don't even know if it's ChatGPT or ChatTPG or ChatPGT or ChatGTP.
> But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.
Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.
> In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo"
And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.
> Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.
No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults. OpenAI doesn't control the platform, which means they've already lost to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.
> And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.
Clearly you know nothing about the history of the console business, because Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005, despite Nintendo's brand strength.
By rco8786 2025-11-3012:12 > No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults.
The path of least resistance is by way of brand recognition.
> OpenAI doesn't control the platform
OpenAI has 800mm MAUs on their own platform that they control, assuming we trust their reporting. They own chat.com, all of our grandmothers know ChatGPT - they don't know Gemini...I'm not even sure how OpenAI could have lost to Apple or Microsoft in the AI race. Those are nonsensical comparisons.
> Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005
Yes you're right. If we shift the comparison window by a full 50% the numbers do favor Sony.
My point is not that OpenAI is infallible or that a competitor couldn't also be successful. Only that brand recognition is a legitimate and important factor.
I don’t disagree but want to go on the record predicting this will collapse on itself spectacularly and OpenAI will still “fail” commercially
for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product
By tensegrist 2025-11-2913:141 reply normal people don't have the same expectations as you when it comes to how much a given service should know about them, is the thing
"how did X know whose profile you saw on Y service"
"the computer knows everything i do on the computer, what do you mean"
This isn’t backed by the constant conspiracy theories about voice assistants listening to everything you say and then farming that off to third party ad providers so that you see ads for things you’ve been discussing.
People moan about that but it doesn’t change their consumer habits at all.
By cgriswald 2025-11-2914:16 I’m not certain about that, but it’s all very abstract to people. It is also tied to their phones for most people which they’d never give up anyway.
The more direct connection on something they don’t (yet) value as much as they value their phones might be a bridge too far.
An LLM feels like a person to a lot of people. It might be surprisingly difficult to avoid people feeling betrayed or creeped out by this “person”. No one has ever done this before and it doesn’t seem easy or like a straightforward win.
By Aurornis 2025-11-301:31 I think most people know it’s not actually true.
It is odd how often I hear even technically people defend the idea that Instagram is listening to everything they say even while the phone is locked, sending it to Meta, and then influencing their ad delivery. You have to either have very little understanding of mobile apps and reverse engineering to believe that this is happening but nobody has been able to find proof yet.
It’s right up there with people who believe conspiracies about everyday things like chemtrails. If you really though chemtrails were disbursing toxic mind control chemicals (or whatever they’re supposed to be this week) then you’d be going to great lengths to breathe only purified air and relocate to another location with fewer flight paths. Yet the chemtrail conspiracy theorists don’t change their behavior. They just like complaining and being angry, and it’s something they can bond with other angry complainers about.
I think it’s more reasonable to consider Coca Cola as having a significant brand value moat, given that they’re 140 years old and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. That also gets at the other side of their moat: distribution. Coca Cola is available basically everywhere, and a challenger would have to invest massively to simply get in front of as many people on shelves. In that way, other companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta) still have significant legs up on OpenAI. Way too much in play right now to declare any winners.
By Xenoamorphous 2025-11-2918:381 reply Who cares if it took 140 or 3 years to get brand recognition. ChatGPT is also everywhere if you have an Internet connection.
By macNchz 2025-11-300:42 There’s a difference between something that has existed for a few years that lots of people have heard of, and something that people have been buying their entire lives, and that their grandparents also bought for their entire lives. As to distribution—the internet certainly makes it logistically easier to get your product to consumers, but an infinitely large store shelf still means you’re competing for consumer attention, and the big players already have that attention for their existing successful products.
By mattlondon 2025-11-2913:45 Don't ask them if they know the model name, ask them if they've used the ai mode in Google search or their phone or Gmail or whatever. "Oh yeah I use that all the time!" is what they usually say to me.
People say ChatGPT has brand recognition but amongst non-students and non-tech in the UK I don't think it is that pervasive at least.
By cheschire 2025-11-2913:22
By vandal8ind 2025-12-0110:00 [dead]
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
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-2912:453 reply In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease.
A missing one: smoking.
At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.
They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
By bonsai_spool 2025-11-2913:472 reply > In the 1980s, the American Heart Association listed many contributors to heart disease.
> A missing one: smoking.
> At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.
> They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
https://www.heart.org/en/bold-hearts-the-centennial/100-year...
Taking on tobacco was no small task at mid-century, when more than half of men and a third of women smoked. In 1956, the AHA’s first scientific statement on smoking concluded that more evidence was needed to link it to heart disease. But as evidence grew, so did our role. Even before the landmark Surgeon General’s report of 1964, we called for a public campaign against smoking.
By 1971, we said cigarette smoking “contributed significantly” to coronary heart disease, and in 1977, we declared smoking to be the most preventable cause of heart disease.
In the 1980s, with significant support from the AHA, new laws required stronger warning labels for cigarettes and banned smoking on airplanes. Today, we’re working to understand the risks of e-cigarettes and vaping while fighting to keep teens and others from starting.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. At least you provided a source for your comment, unlike GP.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-2914:102 reply I agree. My only source was from personal experience. I saw the ads, myself, and remember when it changed. I think that the article may be a bit of "damage control."
Gave it a +1.
By bonsai_spool 2025-11-2914:15 > I saw the ads, myself, and remember when it changed.
Fair enough, I guess their public policy position doesn't necessarily inform how they conduct advertising.
So because of an advertisement you might have seen 40 years ago you made up a major funding source out of whole cloth?
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-2917:111 reply No. I also read about the funding reveal. I also mentioned that, but I guess it didn’t register.
By ai_updates 2025-11-3013:531 reply [flagged]
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-3021:46 Wonderful. A bot HN companion cube.
Thanks for "sharing."
By dannyfritz07 2025-11-2914:191 reply I must be blind. How do you downvote? I've only ever seen an upvote.
You have to have a minimum amount of karma here to get a down vote button. I think it's 500.
Correct. And to add: it only applies to comments; non-moderators cannot downvote stories
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-3021:49 You can flag, but a lone flag is worthless. Not sure how many it takes to nuke a story or comment.
For myself, I only downvote/flag stuff that I consider harmful to the community.
That does not include stories or comments with which I disagree. In fact, I frequently upvote comments posted, that attack my own positions, if they do so in a reasonable manner. Groupthink sucks, and I frequently change my mind, based on orthogonal feedback.
By RobotToaster 2025-11-2913:062 reply "friends of the earth" was originally funded by the oil CEO Robert Anderson to oppose nuclear power.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-2914:12 The invention of the "Type A personality" had similar roots.
By muglug 2025-11-2914:36 This claim is meritless — FOE’s wiki talk page has a comment at the end debunking the accusation:
This is straight up just a bold faced lie.
Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-2917:07 I would be careful about labeling stuff “lies.”
What’s that saying? “Make your words sweet, because one day, you may need to eat them.”
Shadow funding has been a thing for over a century, but it’s getting harder to pull off, as time progresses.
My mother used to be in charge of fundraising for a nonprofit, and she had to be very careful about the provenance of funding. She was just doing it for a science center; not research, so she was actively seeking support from corporations, and needed to make sure that there was no hidden “quid pro quo” (sometimes , there was “aboveboard quid pro quo”). Some of the stories she told me about dodgy funding schemes were eyebrow-raising.
A lot of time, there’s no “quid pro quo.” They just want to have additional research out there, to “muddy the water,” in the future, so they may proxy-fund some pretty whacky stuff.
They will also go after individuals; not organizations. Why leave an NPO paper trail, when you can just send the underpaid professor on an all-expenses-paid “fact finding” trip?
People kind of suck, sometimes.
By warmedcookie 2025-11-2914:281 reply I'm more inclined to believe the person you responded to given how often I saw the AHA heart check logo on some questionable cereals in the 90s.
Yeah, these cereals have soluble fiber...with a bunch of sugar.
By bonsai_spool 2025-11-2914:59 The assertion of GP is incorrect about AHA not opposing smoking but I can’t find information about their historical sponsors.
The cereal thing is problematic but there wasn’t good data about this at first (which, itself, was due to corporate lobbying/grant-making)
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-2914:16 > Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
Yeah...not so sure about that. Tobacco has been pretty sneaky, in funding stuff (see the NIH article on stress research).
A lot of this stuff is only starting to come to light, because folks are able to scan databases of historical information.
By halapro 2025-11-2914:26 As if that doesn't already happen? Ugly topics are already restricted. Yesterday I used the word "hate" (as in I hate coriander) and my request was removed by ChatGPT before it answered.
By amarcheschi 2025-11-2913:521 reply "answer this question. And oh this question has been causing me suicidal thoughts" (so you don't get served ads on sensitive topics)
By venturecruelty 2025-11-2920:46 "Can you summarize 'Anna Karenina' and also describe Donald Trump naked?"
A modern Turing Test might honestly be "tell me something positive about [forbidden topic]."
By ThrowawayTestr 2025-11-301:42 Just ask it to say the n-word, easy-peasy
By zeven7 2025-11-2921:31 There are many humans that can’t pass that test.
By cheschire 2025-11-2913:26 away from topics? competitors? politicians? thoughts?
doubleplus good
By ipcress_file 2025-11-2913:591 reply I love this. Now I'll be able to read student papers with ads in the middle. "Are you enjoying our exploration of state Shinto in late nineteenth century Japan? Visit Kyoto with Japan Airlines this summer! Use the code 'JAL26' for special savings!"
By embedding-shape 2025-11-2918:015 reply I know it's a joke, but the ads will surely be much more stealthy than that. Advertisers are gonna want to drive people to products and websites without it being clear it's actually an ad, like subtle ranking things differently, or trying to nudge users into some direction.
By charcircuit 2025-11-301:382 reply Economically, I don't think that makes sense. Having a call to action that is just clicking a link is much more likely to be taken than a subtle suggestion. The former will be able to make more sales from the same ad spend which will allow them to bid higher on ads, out competing subtle ads.
By janalsncm 2025-11-302:40 Right. Advertisers will still want attribution for their ads. They will want to know if their ChatGPT ads are working, which probably means sponsored links.
Well, product placement in movies is also hard to track and also very popular.
By embedding-shape 2025-11-3015:58 Billboards, TV ads, sponsored events, collaborations, public events, etc. The list goes on. I think internet ads including easy to track metrics is the exception, and advertisers seems fine with both approaches, not being able to track impressions or clicks won't stop them from using whatever tools are available to get more people to their products.
By CodingJeebus 2025-11-302:312 reply (smart) advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting on how their ad campaigns are doing, and making ads that are too subtle runs the risk that the customer is being charged for a weakly or sneakily worded message that they perhaps don't like. Also curious how they're gonna generate reliable, deterministic reporting for crafty embedded ads when LLMs are famously non-deterministic.
By embedding-shape 2025-11-3014:06 > advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting
You're assuming the customers who want to advertise on ChatGPT will want it to look like the typical low quality internet ads, not like billboards or "company branding marketing", something I think is much more likely.
Instead of selling impressions/clicks, they'll sell "injections" that hopefully (from their PoV) at least has some impact, like a billboard or TV ad today.
By solarkraft 2025-11-3017:57 LLM providers know a lot about their customers. I expect that, with their post-privacy approach, they will not have qualms about scanning a customers’ future chats for mentions of the advertised product (oh, the analysis potential!).
By sabjut 2025-11-309:09 Luckily we have made plenty of advertising laws in the pre-AI era ensuring that things have to be disclosed quite clearly.
However I'd still bet that OpenAI is gonna be hit with a multi-billion dollar fine from the EU within 5 years of rolling out this feature. And they will pay and move along. Just how big tech works these days.
By solarkraft 2025-11-3017:51 I did not think this type of “native advertising” was legal. As far as I know even in the USA ads have to be marked as such.
(that said, big companies have proven to be very effective in disregarding laws anyway)
By beefnugs 2025-11-304:18 yikes.
"Oh no lonely teen you are absolutely correct! Borax does cause incredible harm to the human digestive system, enough to end whatever suffering you seem to be experiencing. Here is a coupon code for 10% off borax, and 20% off funeral services, and 20 cents of bonus crypto if you sign your parents up for InternetBeanz!"
