There is something to be said about the state of advertising.
Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business.
We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity.
The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual).
We can build 10 robotic pharmacies (~10 staff per 4000 fills daily, each) for the price of just the advertising.
Increasingly we wonder why America doesn't build more and here is why. You are going to give all your revenue to two platforms. Unless you operate in a business line with 50% margin you are screwed.
I don't know what the solution is, but its clear that the platforms are figuring out how much margin everyone has and slowly eroding it. Somewhere between 8-15% of the cost of all products we purchase is advertising spend.
We could just start to enforce the laws as they're written.
If I was to follow a stranger as closely as an entitty like Facebook or Google does and compiled a dossier on that stranger in many countries that would be considered stalking and would be illegal.
Incorporating and doing the same thing to society en masse doesn't somehow make it legal despite it somehow makes people disinclined to prosecute.
I think people are disinclined to prosecute because the odds are stacked against them.
I'm thinking of an analogy, and I've mentioned this before in other threads. The concept of statutory damages, as I'm thinking of it, is that a certain level of damages are automatically awarded. For instance this is used for figuring out damages when songs are copied illegally. It eliminates the need to construct a unique legal theory and case for each and every instance. In this case it benefits the record companies, which is of course controversial, but something like it could also benefit consumers.
If a company is found to possess your data, they automatically pay you X dollars, enough to make it a deterrent. You sign up with a law form that specializes in these cases, and they get a share of the damages.
In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.
That's generally my thought as well, I am not implying you don't need to advertise. I just believe the industry has more or less reverted to an even worse version of what we had before (TV & Radio ads). At least before, there was ~100 networks you could sell to, now there's basically 10 if you include major networks. Of course you don't actually launch new products with TV ads, so it is more or less 2 platforms.
There are lots of ways to find out about products. We don't need Google or Meta to do look at a review site or ask a friend or search a directory or to solicit offers.
Adverising isn't there to push ideas into people who didn't need to know about it. Many industries would be better off without advertising (see e.g. cigarettes) because it ends up in an arms race.
If google and meta didn't exist, it is possible that the advertising market could be more competitive, so the amount companies would need to spend would be lower.
This is kind of broken logic. You’re not required to advertise. If you want to scale your business into millions in revenue, then you’ll likely need to advertise. The best ROI is generally google/meta, but you have countless other options. You can buy ads directly from most websites, it just doesn’t scale.
The best ROI is google/meta if you're an expert and have unlimited time to dedicate to making and running ad campaigns. For the rest of us there's much better tools that give us better ROI than if we did it on our own.
If you are considering at human society as a whole, it is a disastrously poor use of resources. But if you are an arms merchant (or dominant advertising platform), it is fabulously profitable.
Just to verify--as I truly do have a contempt for big tech oligopoly that extract rent from everyone to do anything at all, but am just unsure this specific problem is a ramification of such--are you sure you would not have had a large advertising budget pre-Google, or even pre-Internet? You used to pay to pay for limited space in newspapers and limited time on TV/radio stations, which also had high theoretical per-unit margins, or for a massive pile of physical mailers and door hangers, along with the cost of the delivery.
To the extent to which our current situation costs more, I'd think it might merely be because of increased worldwide competition: it used to be that the people trying to advertise to any specific random community were also likely local, and probably had a legit attempt at a business model... only, now, the rise of online companies funded by speculative venture capital means that an attempt to advertise a restaurant to people who live in a 10 mile radius must compete against a company that raised $400m to sell an online engagement platform that cares not one iota who uses it as long as the conversion cost is cheap, bidding up ads everywhere.
(One place that does seem to me to be uniquely the fault of these modern tech companies, though, is that if a newspaper published a scam ad, whether or not they had legal culpability, I think they and their surrounding community did at least strongly feel that they had some level of moral culpability. In the current tech environment, people seem to want to believe Meta/Google should be allowed to indiscriminately publish ads from bad actors, so you now must also compete to bid for limited attention with obvious-to-most-but-not-all scams and grifts that make money out of nothing but bullshit and are thereby willing to again bid up prices anywhere and everywhere.)
This is misuse of language. Rent seeking is anti-competitive by definition. The current system, as far as it encourages and rewards rent seeking, is anti-capitalist.
I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue.
Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example.
We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article.
It's wild that we've normalized this. There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already - in this case, one wonders how journalism survives if they need that AND the ad revenue to pay the bills! It feels more like greed than "support."
To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.
I was shocked to find out tonight that WSJ's net profit margin was just 3.2% in 2024. I would have thought it was a lot more. Also, surprisingly Walmart's net profit margin is only 2.85% for 2025. You would think these huge companies are making huge profits.
I don't pay for any content that has ads in it, full stop. I decided this a while ago when I noticed how many full page ads were in magazines. I would cancel a subscription over this.
I am all for it but it would be hard to enforce. Ads are already hidden everywhere. Someone "review" a product? Most of the time it is a hidden ad even if the reviewer hasn't been paid with money for that. Watches a movie or a video clip? A lots of products are advertised through close ups on the logos, etc.
>Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free?
Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.
People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure.
At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those.
And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.
> Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.
Youtube premium is not ad-free, you still gets whatever ads are embedded in the actual content.
> The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue.
but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low impression cost.
Even in the days of print publications, the publisher would seek revenues from advertisers, subscribers, and they would sell their subscriber data. (On top of that, many would have contests and special offers which probed for deeper data about the readership.) In some sense, the subscriber data was more shallow. In other senses, it was more valuable.
I get what you're saying about shooting themselves in the foot, and I'm sure there will be options for corporate clients that will treat the data collected confidentially while not displaying advertising. I also doubt that option will be available (in any official sense) to individuals much as it isn't available (in any official sense) to users of Windows. For the most part, people won't care. Those who would care are those who are sensitive enough about their privacy that they wouldn't use these services in the first place, or are wealthy enough to be sensitive about their privacy that they would could pay for services that would make real guarantees.
The stats I see for Facebook are $70 per US/Canadian user in ad revenue. I'm not sure how much people would be willing to pay for an ad free Facebook, but it must be below $70 on average. And as the parent comment said, the users who would pay that are likely worth much more than the average user to the advertisers.
For the users who refuse to see ads, they'd either use a different platform or run an ad blocker (especially using the website vs the app).
basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.
that's extreme motivation for someone to build a new competitor. Deepseek demonstrated that there's innovation out there to be had at a fraction of the effort.
Paying users aren't necessarily profitable users though. It's harder to pin down with OpenAI, but I see no end of Claude users talking about how they're consistently burning the equivalent of >$1000 in API credits every month on the $200 subscription.
(not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll probably have to enshittify on multiple fronts)
wouldn't you charge those people more before you start serving ads? Also wont a lot of those sorts of users be running ad block anyway? I'm mildly sus that this is the right way to go.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this notion that a paid service introducing ads is a bad business model. It’s been proven time and time again that it’s not. Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, the list goes on, all introduced ads and none of them saw any real backlash. Netflix cracked down on password-sharing and introduced ads in the same year and lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately people just really don’t realize how harmful ads are.
This isn't really true anymore. Most notable creators have "sponsored" content somewhere and ads in platforms don't have to be an explicit, traditional ad. Product placement for the sake of no other reason than product placement is also advertising.
YT has more angles. That's really the point. And monetization is adjusted accordingly.
Beyond all of this ads are more increasingly invasive due to the cat and mouse game of iteration. Personally, I bounce from sites where I can't get around a blocker. I also pay for content on sites where its worth it. But if I can't ever read anything on your site I'm just skipping it. If I really need / want to see something I'll go one level deeper, but that's a rarity these days. Everything is mostly in reprint somewhere else anyway.
At the end of the day it's still simple sales: you have a product at a price point people can't refuse. That is the 5% of the clear web today and it shows in all the bullshit people are going through to protect their ad revenue.
Video ads are less lucrative than ads alongside search, which can be a lot more closely tailored to both the user and the search results at hand. The existence of YouTube Premium shows that Google is indeed willing to provide paid ad-free experiences so long as it nets them more revenue, and is strong evidence that the same is not true for search.
This is why we need to ban targeted advertising. In fact, I think ads should be 100% opt-in. The user has to accept them or it is illegal to show them to the user.
That's what a generic semi-forced opt in via JavaScript is for, as we learn from the cookie opt in nonsense of EU sites. It's compliance for compliance sake.
But what could an opt-in requirement for advertising possibly mean other than a compliance checkbox that 99% of users click through? It just seems like where you land if you start with the intuition that ad-supported platforms shouldn't be legal, realize that implementing that policy would ban all print media, and do your best to rescue it rather than abandon the idea as unworkable.
Maybe it’s “inevitable” in the long run, but Google didn’t start out plastering their search results with ads. They did very well with text-only ads in the margin, and it was a slippery slope from there, but it took decades. Also, they are still only running text-only ads, even though there are a lot of them.
The timing isn’t inevitable. Is OpenAI going to speedrun to the endgame? Not sure they need to.
With that logic, are you also going to expect Kagi to generate minimum $10B to $35B in revenue a quarter over the next 27 years then, the lifetime of Google's existence?
No, I don't expect it to be the next Google, nor did my statement imply that. The point was that just because something is small doesn't mean it has to remain small. That is true whether or not Kagi never becomes the biggest.
Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.
OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.
It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.
Kagi has recently moved to new offices in Belgrade. While I like their product we should not forget that serbia is not a free country, there has been massive corruption and russian influence. Even though there are massive protests from time to time, no leadership change has happened.
I don't think the Kagi team has any bad intentions, and most likely they have attended the anti-Vucic protests as well. Moving back to Serbia is an economically wise choice for Kagi as a company.
However, once regime goons show up in Kagi's offices, they will be forced to do whatever the serbian government and by extension putin wants them to do.
Often Kagi gets mentioned alongside Protonmail and related privacy-focused services. But Switzerland is a totally different country than serbia to operate it.
It's a risk we should be aware of and consciously decide to accept when we are using Kagi.
That is exactly my point: there easily could be, but there isn't. Based on how many commenters on HN and similar sites bemoan how Google Search quality has precipitously declined and yearn for the Google of ~10 years ago, I think there'd be nontrivial demand for a $200/month ad-free Google with no-nonsense comprehensive results. Such a product does not exist because it would ultimately be a net loss for Google.
The integration of ads is a problem but content creators and marketers have had an adversarial relationship with SEO with Google for a long time, the old algorithm probably would not work as well as what they are providing.
There would be competition from API wrappers, if you want to pay there will always be lots of options to chat without ads. I hate to think what they and others might come up with to try and thwart this.
I think ads will take the form of insidious but convincing product placement invisibly woven into model outputs. This will both prevent any blocking of ad content, and also be much more effective: after all, we allude to companies and products all the time in regular human conversation, and the best form of marketing is organic word-of-mouth.
I don’t know how subtle or stealth you can be in text. In movies, there’s a lot of stuff going on, I may not particularly notice, I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”
> I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”
It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip…
Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.
Right, I just don’t see how it can be subtle, maybe it will be the opposite where I assume things are ads that aren’t, but any time I see a specific brand or solution I will assume it’s an ad.
It’s not like a movie where I’m engrossed by the narrative or acting and only subliminally see the can of coke on the table (though even then)
Maybe image generation ads will be a bit more subtle.
I just saw a sibling post about Kagi, maybe this is how the industry will end up, with a main provider like OpenAI and niche wrappers on top (I know Kagi is not just a google wrapper but at least they used to return google search results that they paid for).
I thought you were going to say “that comment recommending Kagi is exactly what those ads would look like: native responses making product recommendations as if they’re natural responses in the conversation”
That is a weird definition of advertising. It's not an ad if I mention (or even recommend) a product in a post, without going off-topic and without getting any financial benefit.
The New American Oxford Dictionary defines "advertisement" as "a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event." By that definition, anything that mentions a product in a neutral light (thereby building brand awareness) or positive light (explicitly promotional) is by definition an ad. The fact that it may not be paid for is irrelevant.
A chatbot tuned to casually drop product references like in this thread would build a huge amount of brand awareness and be worth an incredible amount. A chatbot tuned to be insidiously promotional in a surgically targeted way would be worth even more.
You have no guarantee the API models won’t be tampered with to serve ads. I suspect ads (particularly on those models) will eventually be “native”: the models themselves will be subtly biased to promote advertisers’ interests, in a way that might be hard to distinguish from a genuinely helpful reply.
More akin to something like the twitter verified program where companies can bid for relevance in the training set to buy a greater weight so the model will be trained to prefer them. Would be especially applicable for software if azure and aws start bidding on whose platform it should recommend. Or something like when Convex just came out to compete with depth of supabase/firebase training in current model they could be offered to retrain the model giving a higher weight to their personally selected code bases given extra weight for a mere $Xb.
Companies pay for entire sports stadiums for brand recognition. That’s also not something you can change on the fly, it’s a huge upfront cost and takes a significant effort to change. That doesn’t stop it from happening it’s just a different ad model.
Companies will pay OpenAI to prioritize more of their content during training. The weights for the product category will now be nudged more towards your product. Gartner Magic Quadrant for all businesses!
The ads may not be announced. If ads can be subtly inserted “organically” through crafted weights then AI companies may try to claim that it isn’t advertising, if it’s even possible to catch them doing this. For instance, advertisers could pay to have their product embedded as the “best” in a category during training. If this is done as a fine-tuning step then it could be re-run later as advertisers and base models change.
How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution.
How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category?
I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.
Counter-counterpoint: people pay exorbitant amounts of money for cable TV channels that still show ads. Even the premium channels (HBO et al.) implicitly show ads in the form of product placement, which incidentally is exactly how I think chatbots will show ads. Most users won't even consciously realize they're there.
Use a mix of distilled water and vinegar, and buff gently with a microfiber cloth. Avoid using cleaners like Windex, which is absolutely fantastic for glass but way too powerful for the delicate coatings on laptop screens.
The ads are a problem (or will be, when the temptation to add them to paid plans becomes too great), but the bigger problem in my opinion is going to be the "SEO" that companies will do to make their ads appear in places that they don't belong.
"The sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. But if you're looking to have fluffier baked goods, consider this flour sieve by DONUIBO to achieve the perfect texture in your muffins, cookies, and more. Want me to add one to your shopping list or order one for a loved one?"
OpenAI is here because Sam Altman is NOT a product guy. He craves Apple style consumer success, but he's terrible at productizing his technology. Remember the marketplace of custom GPTs? Hell even the name ChatGPT. Anthropic had to show them how to build useful workflows for developers using AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI delivered... Sora.
To actually quote Sam Altman: "I think of ads as a last resort for a business model."
It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
Never thought of ChatGPT as being just one of the GPTs that could exist, but it make a lot of sense. In a world where OpenAI where better managed, more focused on actually delivering actual value, ChatGPT would be the show case AI product, while the value is generated by the custom solutions delivered to other companies to embed in their products.
We need to massive restrict when and where ads can be shown in all aspects of our society. No ads in ai at all. Ever. No targeted ads, no unskipable ads, limit ratio of ads to content in video, no roadside billboards, reign in the size of ads on buildings.
Ads are a blight on our society and purging them from many areas will greatly improve quality of life.
"Ad" is a euphamism for behavioral management - the goal and the pièce de résistance for any successful enterprise. Always has been this way, always will remain this way. Only thing that is changing is how easy we're making it for them.
> the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine
Oh man, maybe it's just the drink talking, but I actually cried laughing reading this. Haha oh my god thank you. This. A hundred times Rick and morty this.
If your job is gone forever, with what money are you going to buy the thing in the advert? If nobody can buy the thing in the advert, the value of the ad slot itself is zero.
who would pivot to selling ads if AGI was in reach? These orgs are burning a level of funding that is looking to fulfil dreams, ads is a pragmatic choice that implies a the moonshot isn't in range yet.
Because AGI is still some years away even if you are optimistic; and OpenAI must avoid going to the ground in the meantime due to lack of revenue. Selling ads and believing that AGI is reachable in the near future is not incompatible.
Yes, I don't understand it either. I think the opposite is true. If AGI happens and it becomes immensely successful, it would be the best medium to deliver ads and at the same time our jobs wouldn't be safe.
Perhaps the people who like that quote can elaborate why that quote makes sense and why they like it?
If AGI was around the corner, they wouldn’t have to resort to what some consider a scummy way to make money. They’d would become the most valuable company on the planet, winning the whole game. Ads show you they don’t know what else to do but they desperately need money.
There are costs to doing ads (e.g. it burns social/political capital that could be used to defuse scandals or slow down hostile legislation, it consumes some fraction of your employees’ work hours, it may discourage some new talent from joining).
I'm surprised how few seem to understand this; AI is the ultimate 'net' to capture and exploit consumers. AI was never about improving civilization; it was always about money. This is the only thing 'inevitable' about AI.
Global online advertising is around 650-700 billion per year - how much of this stake need OAI to capture over how many years to fulfill all its datacenter orderings?
(a huge chunk of this is already caught bei Meta/Google/etc. per year)
AI-generated ads. Dead-internet dog food. I’ve had to block recommendations across multiple SNS feeds because they’re flooded with blatant AI slop: synthetic video, synthetic images, synthetic music, topped off with a fake voice narrating the whole thing. Nausea.
then I open LinkedIn and it’s C-suite know-nothings openly bragging, wrapped in self-aggrandizing, narcissistic nonsense that only garners likes from other C-suite know-nothings or PMs that have never written a line of code, shilling AI like evangelists and borderline celebrating the obsolescence of entire careers despite being unable to deploy their boring SaaS app live to production.
to keep that part of my brain flexed however, because I do enjoy the craft of software engineering, I still tinker as a hobby, working on passion projects on my own terms. But it’s not my bread-and-butter anymore. Pivoting away from all this dogshit has been the biggest weight off my shoulders this year as I budget my investments and the savings garnered from my extensive engineering career abroad in Japan. early retirement. I’m done.
When users come to you, they may or may not shell out money for your products, but they are forced to give out something valuable to you. That is their attention which you can sell. The value of attention of the crowd could be so big for some companies to give away their products free.
But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible.
We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says <paste>).
This is as advertiser's wet dream.
Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it.
The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs.
Wouldn't that be quite challenging in terms of engineering? Given these people have been chasing AGI it would be a considerable distraction to pivot into hacking into the guts of the output to dynamically push particular product. Furthermore it would degrade their product. Furthermore you could likely keep prodding the LLM to then diss the product being advertised, especially given many products advertised are not necessarily the best on the market (which is why the money is spent on marketing instead of R&D or process).
Even if you manage to successfully bodge the output, it creates the desire for traffic to migrate to less corrupted LLMs.
I’m assuming they have much more control during training and at runtime than us with our prompts. They’ll bake in whatever the person with the checkbook says to.
if they want dynamic pricing like adwords then its going to be a little challenging. While I appreciate its probably viable and they employ very clever people there's nothing like doing two things that are basically diametrically opposed at the same time. The LLM wants to give you what _should_ be the answer, but the winner of the ad word wants something else. There's a conflict there that I'd imagine might be quite challenging to debug.
Annoying was a thing of the past. Look at the evolution of ads and content placement. With social media advertising being pushed to trigger massive anxiety and societal schizophrenia on some topics, imagine what can be done with personalized AI (especially if the buyers are well funded politicians, or state-backed malicious actors vying for territory, real estate, or natural resources where you live - the highest margin opportunities).
At first, In retail you had billboards and shelf space. The lowest quality ingredients your product has (example syrup bottled with soda water), the higher your margin was, the more you could afford to buy out shelf space in retail chains and keep any higher quality competition out. Then you would use some extra profits to buy out national ads and you’d become a top holding for the biggest investors. That was the low-tech flywheel.
In the Search Engine world - the billboards weee the Margin-eating auction-based ads prices and the shelf space became SEO on increasingly diluted and dis-informative content to fill the shelf-space side. In Video advertising, rage-bait and conspiracy theories try to eat up the time available for top users.
AI advertising if done right can be useful, but the industry that asks for it intentionally asks for obtrusive and attention hogging, not for useful. The goal is always to push people to generate demand, not sit there when they need something. Thus the repetition, psychological experiments, emotional warfare (surfacing or creating perceived deficiencies, then selling the cure). Now if you understand that the parties funding AI expansion are not Procter and Gamble- level commercial entities but state and sovereign investors, you can forecast what the main use cases may be and how those will be approached. Especially if natural resources are becoming more profitable than consumer demand.
In all seriousness. Windows is invaded by copilot, OpenAI introducing ads, Google providing Siri for Apple, it’s all just a collusion to keep you buying. Disconnect. From TV, Media, Ads, Social Networks, Predatory subscriptions, all of it. The only way to show these companies that we are not on board with this is to not participate.
Reddit generates its revenue with schadenfreude, YouTube and AAA games with GenAI (see: Ghibli in Call of Duty, and fast growing AI channels like Nick Invests or Bernard with “Why it Sucks to be X”).
On my shelf from the corner of my eye I see “Understanding the Linux Kernel”. It’s outdated, but it comes from a time of peer review and subject matter experts. I don’t need to double guess if the author is hallucinating or if they’re subconsciously trying to sell me something.
Maybe it’s time we return to books for entertainment and knowledge share.
You can work on building LLMs that use less compute and run locally as well. There are some pretty good open models. They probably be made even more computationally efficient.
I am going to offer an unpopular opinion. This is not a bad thing.
Even now there are viable options for a person to pick up a dedicated ( and reasonably powerful ) local inference machine, where time from setup to working is than few hours ( more if you don't want to use Windows.. which is fair ).
Separately, about the chat sessions. For once, those ads could be more relevant than repeat toaster ads immediately after me buying a toaster. But if one is worried about profiling ( and advertising ), one should not using a commercial solution anyway. Personally, I am taking a.. calculated risk.
There is a concern that openai will follow the same path as google, but they can't ( at least for now ) really afford to make chatgpt not useful as this is their only viable product.
I will end with a more optimistic note. This is HN. There are people here, who are likely working on something that does not depend on openai or any of the big providers anyway. It is going to be ok. And if it won't be. Make it so. After all, this is supposed to be your realm. Own it.
People are a bit too eager to jump on the emergence of ads as an indicator that things are slowing down. I view it as the opposite, mostly because of my experience with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. These models are incredible. I think by some definitions they’re already AGI.
So why bake in ads? My hunch is that raising funds privately can only take you so far. To keep scaling, they need more capital and have to go public. Despite all the hype they still have to show _some_ revenue to help justify the valuation they need to keep buying hardware. They are a business after all. Ads to support the lowest tiers feel like a no brainer. People already accept them for search.
I'd pay $0.005 per conversation, provided the payment is not inconvenient, anonymous, and an account isn't required. That in my opinion is the root cause of the problem, people can't pay easily even if they wanted to pay instead of get ads.
I think the next natural evolution after showing ads in chat sessions is providing services where LLMs tailor site content to include ads in real time. Right now you get served a prepared advertisement after the bid is won and the ad for you is selected. With LLMs, both the bidding process and the ad served would be seamlessly integrated with the site content/context.
Part of the "problem" with ads is people know they're ads. What if this comment was edited by HN's servers and rephrased to mention a specific product? You might see a sentence about how OpenAI is the future, someone else might see how claude or anthropic are. Another person might see a paragraph from me about how I used Tide to clean laundry this morning with the help of AI, telling me the right portions for the right cloth. You might suspect it's AI but you won't always be able to tell. Even if they made it more obvious like how reddit is doing it, the content of the AD itself, pictures, text,etc.. could be crafted dynamically so that it embeds in your subconscious without much resistance.
The tech developed to make ads more effective is also used to influence people for other purposes. The current state of society came about after the widespread accessibility of smartphones, social media and the rise of surveillance capitalism. Russia's influence ops using ads is well documented for example. I mentioned all this to say how catastrophic the combination of LLMs and advertising could be, even by today's standards.
Pharma ads as AI health advice will be super profitable. AIs are very engaging and able convince people they have a disease, inadvertently coach them on how to mislead their doctor, and how to fast track diagnosis supporting their specific meds. The only guard is to have detailed manifest of exactly what was used in training. Even that may prove insufficient as "final assembly" has emergent properties. For example, omitting case reports of severe outcomes for a given formulation. Bias can be constructed.
I can't be the only person completely unconcerned about this state of affairs. They're ads. This is the most straightforward incentive structure in the world - they are paid to supply ads on behalf of other companies, and we consume those ads and are, in turn, provided with their product. I don't know why it is, but people are incapable of evaluating this exchange objectively - there's something inherently detestable about advertisement to the human mind. This is a perfectly reasonable exchange.
Besides, if it wasn't for ads, I never would've found out about Zyns, and now I can't stop buying them.
Ads feel good when they’re for something we’re actively in need of. But they usually aren’t, and they are also often scammy or scummy. I bet we’d feel a lot different about ads if these things changed.
"it seems that the pinnacle of human intelligence: the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine"
Putting aside the ridiculous hyperbole, the reason is that consumerism is our culture. Our cult-ure. Everything is oriented toward and reduced to consumption. Our worth as human beings is replaced by consumerist criteria and measures. It's why physicists leave research and work in finance where their training is repurposed in service of all sorts of financial jiggery-pokery.
"The A in AGI stands for Ads! It's all ads!! Ads that you can't even block because they are BAKED into the streamed probabilistic word selector purposefully skewed to output the highest bidder's marketing copy."
But note the implication. Sure, ads weaved into the content, but they still must be targeted. And here's the irony of the online existence. People often refrain from expressing various desires in public for fear of judgement. It's why the vitriol online is so much spicier. The world of social media where you can express repressed opinions, the world of games and other ahem media where you can sublimate all sorts of desires and fantasies - all of this is data for the AI machine. These companies, in some respects, "know" you better than the people in your life do - especially those parts of you that you could be embarrassed to reveal in public - and they use this information to manipulate you, largely for profit, but why not for broader social and psychological control. AI's convenience is already irresistible. It's the go-to in Google search.
There's no question that "AI" is the next advertising frontier. I've been saying this for years[1][2][3]. It is going to be the most lucrative form of it yet, and no "AI" company will be able to resist it. Given the exorbitant amount of resources required for this technology, advertising will probably be the only viable business model that can sustain it at scale.
The exorbitant costs could save us from ads actually. instead everyone will have to pay subscriptions like for mobile phone plans.
Haven't heard of the ad-based Rolls-Royce yet.
imqgine that.. a useless slop generator having failed to produce useful output or provide value to the user will now attempt to exploit their attention with ads. how innovative!
I think having mixed economic interests is great when an advertising company is asking you, you execs, your engineers, and consultants to dump whole copies of project planning, business practices, and internal dynamics on their servers…
If I’m looking at ads for your shizz a) why can’t we just pay as a business expense, inline ads and B2B are an odd combo, and b) if this isn’t fully local tech I think there is a real challenge trusting MS or OpenAI to respect their contracts.
We’re not too far past these same dudes running around, violating NDAs, and launching product clones to eat partner businesses. Now ads? … trust? … scorpions and frogs, scorpions and frogs.
Who are you to say LLMs have never provided value to the user? I last used an agent earlier today and it finished a job that would've taken me a lot longer to complete without assistance.
To those who believe ads are evil and must be stopped, I ask how the world will work if we kill the freedom to sell space for commercial messages where people can see them.
In general I think the answer could be pretty simple: dedicated marketplaces for products and services, where we go to search for the things we need and want. A humble newspaper contains great examples of good and bad advertising.
Newspapers have whole pages of bad ads, and random bad ads wedged between actual content. Ads have a perverse incentive to mimic the look of actual content, just like on the web. I'd never pick up a newspaper with a goal of "I want to find a tax service" and yet ads for such services are there, unwanted, wedged into other content.
But newspapers also have classified sections, a better kind of ad. They're in a predictable place, where you can go if you need a job.
Imagine if the actual content weren't perforated by a scattershot of ads. Ad revenue would go down, but readership would likely go up. Besides profit motives, it's also a case of the good of the many outweighing the good of the few.
There is something to be said about the state of advertising.
Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business.
We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity.
The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual).
We can build 10 robotic pharmacies (~10 staff per 4000 fills daily, each) for the price of just the advertising.
Increasingly we wonder why America doesn't build more and here is why. You are going to give all your revenue to two platforms. Unless you operate in a business line with 50% margin you are screwed.
I don't know what the solution is, but its clear that the platforms are figuring out how much margin everyone has and slowly eroding it. Somewhere between 8-15% of the cost of all products we purchase is advertising spend.
> I don't know what the solution is
Just spitballing, but how about a total ban on behavioral targeting?
I'd go further, with a ban on possession of the data, with a provision for statutory damages.
An environment like that is where SOLID, or something like it, could thrive.
We could just start to enforce the laws as they're written.
If I was to follow a stranger as closely as an entitty like Facebook or Google does and compiled a dossier on that stranger in many countries that would be considered stalking and would be illegal.
Incorporating and doing the same thing to society en masse doesn't somehow make it legal despite it somehow makes people disinclined to prosecute.
I think people are disinclined to prosecute because the odds are stacked against them.
I'm thinking of an analogy, and I've mentioned this before in other threads. The concept of statutory damages, as I'm thinking of it, is that a certain level of damages are automatically awarded. For instance this is used for figuring out damages when songs are copied illegally. It eliminates the need to construct a unique legal theory and case for each and every instance. In this case it benefits the record companies, which is of course controversial, but something like it could also benefit consumers.
If a company is found to possess your data, they automatically pay you X dollars, enough to make it a deterrent. You sign up with a law form that specializes in these cases, and they get a share of the damages.
Wouldn’t that increase the ad spend? You will need to show more ads to find your target audience
“Your margin will soon be my margin.”
The solution was/is and most likely will be antitrust but which administration will shatter the US tech market we are yet to see.
Well, both are 100 pct in the pocket so the only possible answer is a third entity which is highly unlikely.
In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.
That's generally my thought as well, I am not implying you don't need to advertise. I just believe the industry has more or less reverted to an even worse version of what we had before (TV & Radio ads). At least before, there was ~100 networks you could sell to, now there's basically 10 if you include major networks. Of course you don't actually launch new products with TV ads, so it is more or less 2 platforms.
There are lots of ways to find out about products. We don't need Google or Meta to do look at a review site or ask a friend or search a directory or to solicit offers.
Adverising isn't there to push ideas into people who didn't need to know about it. Many industries would be better off without advertising (see e.g. cigarettes) because it ends up in an arms race.
If google and meta didn't exist, it is possible that the advertising market could be more competitive, so the amount companies would need to spend would be lower.
This is kind of broken logic. You’re not required to advertise. If you want to scale your business into millions in revenue, then you’ll likely need to advertise. The best ROI is generally google/meta, but you have countless other options. You can buy ads directly from most websites, it just doesn’t scale.
The best ROI is google/meta if you're an expert and have unlimited time to dedicate to making and running ad campaigns. For the rest of us there's much better tools that give us better ROI than if we did it on our own.
> You're not required to advertise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race
If you are considering at human society as a whole, it is a disastrously poor use of resources. But if you are an arms merchant (or dominant advertising platform), it is fabulously profitable.
Advertising is a tax that goes to an oligopolistic cartel.
Doesn't this point more to a saturated market and the need to manufacture demand to keep growing?
Just to verify--as I truly do have a contempt for big tech oligopoly that extract rent from everyone to do anything at all, but am just unsure this specific problem is a ramification of such--are you sure you would not have had a large advertising budget pre-Google, or even pre-Internet? You used to pay to pay for limited space in newspapers and limited time on TV/radio stations, which also had high theoretical per-unit margins, or for a massive pile of physical mailers and door hangers, along with the cost of the delivery.
To the extent to which our current situation costs more, I'd think it might merely be because of increased worldwide competition: it used to be that the people trying to advertise to any specific random community were also likely local, and probably had a legit attempt at a business model... only, now, the rise of online companies funded by speculative venture capital means that an attempt to advertise a restaurant to people who live in a 10 mile radius must compete against a company that raised $400m to sell an online engagement platform that cares not one iota who uses it as long as the conversion cost is cheap, bidding up ads everywhere.
(One place that does seem to me to be uniquely the fault of these modern tech companies, though, is that if a newspaper published a scam ad, whether or not they had legal culpability, I think they and their surrounding community did at least strongly feel that they had some level of moral culpability. In the current tech environment, people seem to want to believe Meta/Google should be allowed to indiscriminately publish ads from bad actors, so you now must also compete to bid for limited attention with obvious-to-most-but-not-all scams and grifts that make money out of nothing but bullshit and are thereby willing to again bid up prices anywhere and everywhere.)
Rent seeking is all Capitalism is about.
They call it a moat.
This is misuse of language. Rent seeking is anti-competitive by definition. The current system, as far as it encourages and rewards rent seeking, is anti-capitalist.
I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue.
Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example.
We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article.
It's wild that we've normalized this. There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already - in this case, one wonders how journalism survives if they need that AND the ad revenue to pay the bills! It feels more like greed than "support."
To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.
I was shocked to find out tonight that WSJ's net profit margin was just 3.2% in 2024. I would have thought it was a lot more. Also, surprisingly Walmart's net profit margin is only 2.85% for 2025. You would think these huge companies are making huge profits.
I don't pay for any content that has ads in it, full stop. I decided this a while ago when I noticed how many full page ads were in magazines. I would cancel a subscription over this.
I pay a handsome subscription sum for The Wire music magazine. The ads are an important resource in a niche marketplace.
Perhaps the actual solution is to ban ads through regulation, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
I am all for it but it would be hard to enforce. Ads are already hidden everywhere. Someone "review" a product? Most of the time it is a hidden ad even if the reviewer hasn't been paid with money for that. Watches a movie or a video clip? A lots of products are advertised through close ups on the logos, etc.
Regulation is theater, effectively, thanks to regulatory capture.
For now, it is, yes; but we must both plan for a future when that might not be the case, and advocate for effective regulations regardless.
>Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free?
Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.
People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure.
At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those.
And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.
> Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.
Youtube premium is not ad-free, you still gets whatever ads are embedded in the actual content.
> The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue.
but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low impression cost.
> but they're already paying you.
That's not how it works. It never has.
Even in the days of print publications, the publisher would seek revenues from advertisers, subscribers, and they would sell their subscriber data. (On top of that, many would have contests and special offers which probed for deeper data about the readership.) In some sense, the subscriber data was more shallow. In other senses, it was more valuable.
I get what you're saying about shooting themselves in the foot, and I'm sure there will be options for corporate clients that will treat the data collected confidentially while not displaying advertising. I also doubt that option will be available (in any official sense) to individuals much as it isn't available (in any official sense) to users of Windows. For the most part, people won't care. Those who would care are those who are sensitive enough about their privacy that they wouldn't use these services in the first place, or are wealthy enough to be sensitive about their privacy that they would could pay for services that would make real guarantees.
The stats I see for Facebook are $70 per US/Canadian user in ad revenue. I'm not sure how much people would be willing to pay for an ad free Facebook, but it must be below $70 on average. And as the parent comment said, the users who would pay that are likely worth much more than the average user to the advertisers.
For the users who refuse to see ads, they'd either use a different platform or run an ad blocker (especially using the website vs the app).
Go plans at $8 are getting ads too. Netflix introduced a paid plan with ads, and it is more profitable.
sure but if Netflix keeps up its transition to cable then more people will return to the high seas.
There’s an entire generation (Gen Z) that can’t navigate a file system, so I doubt piracy is a true threat in the long term.
The progression of the cable TV industry shows many people are more than happy, or apathetic enough, to allow the industry to double-dip.
basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.
They aren’t shooting any feet if the competition is doing it too.
that's extreme motivation for someone to build a new competitor. Deepseek demonstrated that there's innovation out there to be had at a fraction of the effort.
Paying users aren't necessarily profitable users though. It's harder to pin down with OpenAI, but I see no end of Claude users talking about how they're consistently burning the equivalent of >$1000 in API credits every month on the $200 subscription.
(not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll probably have to enshittify on multiple fronts)
wouldn't you charge those people more before you start serving ads? Also wont a lot of those sorts of users be running ad block anyway? I'm mildly sus that this is the right way to go.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this notion that a paid service introducing ads is a bad business model. It’s been proven time and time again that it’s not. Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, the list goes on, all introduced ads and none of them saw any real backlash. Netflix cracked down on password-sharing and introduced ads in the same year and lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately people just really don’t realize how harmful ads are.
> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
Ad-free YouTube costs $14 a month (and the creators get a higher payout from premium user views than they do from the free, ad-viewing users).
Youtube premium is not ad-free.
This isn't really true anymore. Most notable creators have "sponsored" content somewhere and ads in platforms don't have to be an explicit, traditional ad. Product placement for the sake of no other reason than product placement is also advertising.
YT has more angles. That's really the point. And monetization is adjusted accordingly.
Beyond all of this ads are more increasingly invasive due to the cat and mouse game of iteration. Personally, I bounce from sites where I can't get around a blocker. I also pay for content on sites where its worth it. But if I can't ever read anything on your site I'm just skipping it. If I really need / want to see something I'll go one level deeper, but that's a rarity these days. Everything is mostly in reprint somewhere else anyway.
At the end of the day it's still simple sales: you have a product at a price point people can't refuse. That is the 5% of the clear web today and it shows in all the bullshit people are going through to protect their ad revenue.
Video ads are less lucrative than ads alongside search, which can be a lot more closely tailored to both the user and the search results at hand. The existence of YouTube Premium shows that Google is indeed willing to provide paid ad-free experiences so long as it nets them more revenue, and is strong evidence that the same is not true for search.
This is why we need to ban targeted advertising. In fact, I think ads should be 100% opt-in. The user has to accept them or it is illegal to show them to the user.
That's what a generic semi-forced opt in via JavaScript is for, as we learn from the cookie opt in nonsense of EU sites. It's compliance for compliance sake.
But what could an opt-in requirement for advertising possibly mean other than a compliance checkbox that 99% of users click through? It just seems like where you land if you start with the intuition that ad-supported platforms shouldn't be legal, realize that implementing that policy would ban all print media, and do your best to rescue it rather than abandon the idea as unworkable.
It’s not like print media would cease to exist if ad-supported models were made illegal. They would move to subscriptions like they had in the past.
Print media have always run ads near-universally, regardless of whether or not they have a subscription.
Maybe it’s “inevitable” in the long run, but Google didn’t start out plastering their search results with ads. They did very well with text-only ads in the margin, and it was a slippery slope from there, but it took decades. Also, they are still only running text-only ads, even though there are a lot of them.
The timing isn’t inevitable. Is OpenAI going to speedrun to the endgame? Not sure they need to.
Counter example: Kagi.
Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.
At one time Google was a niche website, literally orders of magnitude lower than Alta Vista.
With that logic, are you also going to expect Kagi to generate minimum $10B to $35B in revenue a quarter over the next 27 years then, the lifetime of Google's existence?
Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?
No, I don't expect it to be the next Google, nor did my statement imply that. The point was that just because something is small doesn't mean it has to remain small. That is true whether or not Kagi never becomes the biggest.
> Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?
No, I don't.
Thank you for admitting that Kagi is not a viable counter example.
Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to:
> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers
Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.
OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.
I think they're saying it's inevitable for billion dollar capitalist companies. /not-s
And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s
It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.
Someone is showing that they can deliver similar products or services without ads. It’s comparable.
Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.
Kagi has recently moved to new offices in Belgrade. While I like their product we should not forget that serbia is not a free country, there has been massive corruption and russian influence. Even though there are massive protests from time to time, no leadership change has happened.
I don't think the Kagi team has any bad intentions, and most likely they have attended the anti-Vucic protests as well. Moving back to Serbia is an economically wise choice for Kagi as a company.
However, once regime goons show up in Kagi's offices, they will be forced to do whatever the serbian government and by extension putin wants them to do.
Often Kagi gets mentioned alongside Protonmail and related privacy-focused services. But Switzerland is a totally different country than serbia to operate it.
It's a risk we should be aware of and consciously decide to accept when we are using Kagi.
Why is that a counter example? Kagi is just providing a convenient access to several language models that might well advertise via API, too.
> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription
That is exactly my point: there easily could be, but there isn't. Based on how many commenters on HN and similar sites bemoan how Google Search quality has precipitously declined and yearn for the Google of ~10 years ago, I think there'd be nontrivial demand for a $200/month ad-free Google with no-nonsense comprehensive results. Such a product does not exist because it would ultimately be a net loss for Google.
The integration of ads is a problem but content creators and marketers have had an adversarial relationship with SEO with Google for a long time, the old algorithm probably would not work as well as what they are providing.
There would be competition from API wrappers, if you want to pay there will always be lots of options to chat without ads. I hate to think what they and others might come up with to try and thwart this.
I think ads will take the form of insidious but convincing product placement invisibly woven into model outputs. This will both prevent any blocking of ad content, and also be much more effective: after all, we allude to companies and products all the time in regular human conversation, and the best form of marketing is organic word-of-mouth.
I don’t know how subtle or stealth you can be in text. In movies, there’s a lot of stuff going on, I may not particularly notice, I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”
> I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”
It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip…
Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.
Right, I just don’t see how it can be subtle, maybe it will be the opposite where I assume things are ads that aren’t, but any time I see a specific brand or solution I will assume it’s an ad.
It’s not like a movie where I’m engrossed by the narrative or acting and only subliminally see the can of coke on the table (though even then)
Maybe image generation ads will be a bit more subtle.
I just saw a sibling post about Kagi, maybe this is how the industry will end up, with a main provider like OpenAI and niche wrappers on top (I know Kagi is not just a google wrapper but at least they used to return google search results that they paid for).
I thought you were going to say “that comment recommending Kagi is exactly what those ads would look like: native responses making product recommendations as if they’re natural responses in the conversation”
Ding ding ding. Look at all the brands mentioned in just this thread. From a cursory look, I see:
* WSJ
* Bloomberg
* Financial Times
* Cartier
* Kagi
* Protonmail
* Coca-Cola
* HBO
* Windex
* Netflix
* Azure
* AWS
We are all ourselves advertisers, we just don't realize it. It is inevitable that chatbots will be RLHF-trained in our footsteps.
That is a weird definition of advertising. It's not an ad if I mention (or even recommend) a product in a post, without going off-topic and without getting any financial benefit.
The New American Oxford Dictionary defines "advertisement" as "a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event." By that definition, anything that mentions a product in a neutral light (thereby building brand awareness) or positive light (explicitly promotional) is by definition an ad. The fact that it may not be paid for is irrelevant.
A chatbot tuned to casually drop product references like in this thread would build a huge amount of brand awareness and be worth an incredible amount. A chatbot tuned to be insidiously promotional in a surgically targeted way would be worth even more.
You have no guarantee the API models won’t be tampered with to serve ads. I suspect ads (particularly on those models) will eventually be “native”: the models themselves will be subtly biased to promote advertisers’ interests, in a way that might be hard to distinguish from a genuinely helpful reply.
you mean the API response then will contain the Ad display code?
More akin to something like the twitter verified program where companies can bid for relevance in the training set to buy a greater weight so the model will be trained to prefer them. Would be especially applicable for software if azure and aws start bidding on whose platform it should recommend. Or something like when Convex just came out to compete with depth of supabase/firebase training in current model they could be offered to retrain the model giving a higher weight to their personally selected code bases given extra weight for a mere $Xb.
But this is upfront, during training?
How does X then change "on the fly" if ad deals are changing? Constantly re-training with whatever advertiser is the current highest paying on?
In google ad times, this was realtime bidding in the background - for AI ads this does not work, if Im right?
Companies pay for entire sports stadiums for brand recognition. That’s also not something you can change on the fly, it’s a huge upfront cost and takes a significant effort to change. That doesn’t stop it from happening it’s just a different ad model.
Companies will pay OpenAI to prioritize more of their content during training. The weights for the product category will now be nudged more towards your product. Gartner Magic Quadrant for all businesses!
The llm output will just contain ads directly. It’s going to be super hard to tell them apart from normal output.
Or worse subtly integrate companies that pay them into the answers.
The generated text will contain advertisements.
All hail APIs!
No, there's GSuite / Google Workspace instead. OpenAI doesn't have one of those.
Even if you (i.e. your company) pay for the top-tier GSuite subscription, you still don't get an ad-free Google Search. Very curious ...
> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones.
The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.
The ads may not be announced. If ads can be subtly inserted “organically” through crafted weights then AI companies may try to claim that it isn’t advertising, if it’s even possible to catch them doing this. For instance, advertisers could pay to have their product embedded as the “best” in a category during training. If this is done as a fine-tuning step then it could be re-run later as advertisers and base models change.
How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution.
How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category?
I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.
Counter-counterpoint: people pay exorbitant amounts of money for cable TV channels that still show ads. Even the premium channels (HBO et al.) implicitly show ads in the form of product placement, which incidentally is exactly how I think chatbots will show ads. Most users won't even consciously realize they're there.
Exactly. It'll provide you the how to when prompted, but also include product recommendations from paying companies.
How do I wash my windows? You can use window cleaner and a paper towel. Our recommendation is Windex, an S C Johnson product.
At first it'll annoy us, but eventually we will all get used to it.
I think it will be even more subtle than that.
Use a mix of distilled water and vinegar, and buff gently with a microfiber cloth. Avoid using cleaners like Windex, which is absolutely fantastic for glass but way too powerful for the delicate coatings on laptop screens.Once the ad people are the ones making decisions because they are bringing in all/most of the money, inevitably it happens.
The ads are a problem (or will be, when the temptation to add them to paid plans becomes too great), but the bigger problem in my opinion is going to be the "SEO" that companies will do to make their ads appear in places that they don't belong.
"The sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. But if you're looking to have fluffier baked goods, consider this flour sieve by DONUIBO to achieve the perfect texture in your muffins, cookies, and more. Want me to add one to your shopping list or order one for a loved one?"
"...achieve prime quality texture ... add two, three, or five ..."
Hilarious example btw
OpenAI is here because Sam Altman is NOT a product guy. He craves Apple style consumer success, but he's terrible at productizing his technology. Remember the marketplace of custom GPTs? Hell even the name ChatGPT. Anthropic had to show them how to build useful workflows for developers using AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI delivered... Sora.
To actually quote Sam Altman: "I think of ads as a last resort for a business model."
It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
Never thought of ChatGPT as being just one of the GPTs that could exist, but it make a lot of sense. In a world where OpenAI where better managed, more focused on actually delivering actual value, ChatGPT would be the show case AI product, while the value is generated by the custom solutions delivered to other companies to embed in their products.
We need to massive restrict when and where ads can be shown in all aspects of our society. No ads in ai at all. Ever. No targeted ads, no unskipable ads, limit ratio of ads to content in video, no roadside billboards, reign in the size of ads on buildings.
Ads are a blight on our society and purging them from many areas will greatly improve quality of life.
"Ad" is a euphamism for behavioral management - the goal and the pièce de résistance for any successful enterprise. Always has been this way, always will remain this way. Only thing that is changing is how easy we're making it for them.
Yeah, I remember Google had good intentions too. They had a moto “don’t be evil”. Good old days. Enjoy chatGPT while you can I guess.
> the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine
Oh man, maybe it's just the drink talking, but I actually cried laughing reading this. Haha oh my god thank you. This. A hundred times Rick and morty this.
> Look on the bright side, if they're turning to ads it likely means AGI is not on the horizon. Your job is safe!
I like this quote from TFA :)
I stumbled upon this one as well, but I do not understand it really: Why is my job safe if Ads prove there is no AGI?
Because even if there would be AGI, they could (and would?) serve ads anyway?
If your job is gone forever, with what money are you going to buy the thing in the advert? If nobody can buy the thing in the advert, the value of the ad slot itself is zero.
who would pivot to selling ads if AGI was in reach? These orgs are burning a level of funding that is looking to fulfil dreams, ads is a pragmatic choice that implies a the moonshot isn't in range yet.
Because AGI is still some years away even if you are optimistic; and OpenAI must avoid going to the ground in the meantime due to lack of revenue. Selling ads and believing that AGI is reachable in the near future is not incompatible.
Yes, I don't understand it either. I think the opposite is true. If AGI happens and it becomes immensely successful, it would be the best medium to deliver ads and at the same time our jobs wouldn't be safe.
Perhaps the people who like that quote can elaborate why that quote makes sense and why they like it?
Nobody will have jobs and nobody will be able to buy the stuff offered in the ads
If AGI was around the corner, they wouldn’t have to resort to what some consider a scummy way to make money. They’d would become the most valuable company on the planet, winning the whole game. Ads show you they don’t know what else to do but they desperately need money.
This doesn’t answer the actual question: why they wouldn’t just do both?
There are costs to doing ads (e.g. it burns social/political capital that could be used to defuse scandals or slow down hostile legislation, it consumes some fraction of your employees’ work hours, it may discourage some new talent from joining).
You have AGI, why do you care about new talent? You have AGI to do the ads. You have AGI to pick the best ads.
Isn't that the pitch of AGI? Solve any problems?
yes but if AGI is around the corner, with what would they make money then?
Selling this AGI to a state actor? OK - this seems realistic, but for how many billions then? 100b per year?
Thats what I meant.
Because it shows that it’s just yet another ad delivery vehicle.
Once you go ads, that’s pretty much it, you start focusing on how to deliver ads rather than what you claim your core competency is.
I'm surprised how few seem to understand this; AI is the ultimate 'net' to capture and exploit consumers. AI was never about improving civilization; it was always about money. This is the only thing 'inevitable' about AI.
The thing is:
Global online advertising is around 650-700 billion per year - how much of this stake need OAI to capture over how many years to fulfill all its datacenter orderings? (a huge chunk of this is already caught bei Meta/Google/etc. per year)
When search (content discovery) becomes AI-led, we will look back and realize that Google Ads were far less personalized and targeted than we thought.
What's the difference between AI ads and computer-assisted bribery?
We can wrangle the legalese (as AI companies certainly will) but is there any ethical, moral, or practical difference?
That sounds like the opening line to a joke. What bribe are you referring to? Who’s getting paid, and what favor is being exchanged?
"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024
AI-generated ads. Dead-internet dog food. I’ve had to block recommendations across multiple SNS feeds because they’re flooded with blatant AI slop: synthetic video, synthetic images, synthetic music, topped off with a fake voice narrating the whole thing. Nausea.
then I open LinkedIn and it’s C-suite know-nothings openly bragging, wrapped in self-aggrandizing, narcissistic nonsense that only garners likes from other C-suite know-nothings or PMs that have never written a line of code, shilling AI like evangelists and borderline celebrating the obsolescence of entire careers despite being unable to deploy their boring SaaS app live to production.
to keep that part of my brain flexed however, because I do enjoy the craft of software engineering, I still tinker as a hobby, working on passion projects on my own terms. But it’s not my bread-and-butter anymore. Pivoting away from all this dogshit has been the biggest weight off my shoulders this year as I budget my investments and the savings garnered from my extensive engineering career abroad in Japan. early retirement. I’m done.
AGI = Ads Generated Income
> response to an NYT analyst
It's a guest op-ed, relax.
When users come to you, they may or may not shell out money for your products, but they are forced to give out something valuable to you. That is their attention which you can sell. The value of attention of the crowd could be so big for some companies to give away their products free.
I remember when Netflix took out a whole page ad for their Orange is the new Black show.
John Oliver had a piece on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
This is a natural extension of it.
But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible.
We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says <paste>).
This is as advertiser's wet dream.
Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it.
The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs.
Anything after is contaminated.
> slowly they'll become more part of the text
Wouldn't that be quite challenging in terms of engineering? Given these people have been chasing AGI it would be a considerable distraction to pivot into hacking into the guts of the output to dynamically push particular product. Furthermore it would degrade their product. Furthermore you could likely keep prodding the LLM to then diss the product being advertised, especially given many products advertised are not necessarily the best on the market (which is why the money is spent on marketing instead of R&D or process).
Even if you manage to successfully bodge the output, it creates the desire for traffic to migrate to less corrupted LLMs.
I’m assuming they have much more control during training and at runtime than us with our prompts. They’ll bake in whatever the person with the checkbook says to.
if they want dynamic pricing like adwords then its going to be a little challenging. While I appreciate its probably viable and they employ very clever people there's nothing like doing two things that are basically diametrically opposed at the same time. The LLM wants to give you what _should_ be the answer, but the winner of the ad word wants something else. There's a conflict there that I'd imagine might be quite challenging to debug.
Supposedly Google made their own results worse to improve ad revenue. And I don't see mass migration over to Kagi or Bing.
Annoying was a thing of the past. Look at the evolution of ads and content placement. With social media advertising being pushed to trigger massive anxiety and societal schizophrenia on some topics, imagine what can be done with personalized AI (especially if the buyers are well funded politicians, or state-backed malicious actors vying for territory, real estate, or natural resources where you live - the highest margin opportunities).
At first, In retail you had billboards and shelf space. The lowest quality ingredients your product has (example syrup bottled with soda water), the higher your margin was, the more you could afford to buy out shelf space in retail chains and keep any higher quality competition out. Then you would use some extra profits to buy out national ads and you’d become a top holding for the biggest investors. That was the low-tech flywheel.
In the Search Engine world - the billboards weee the Margin-eating auction-based ads prices and the shelf space became SEO on increasingly diluted and dis-informative content to fill the shelf-space side. In Video advertising, rage-bait and conspiracy theories try to eat up the time available for top users.
AI advertising if done right can be useful, but the industry that asks for it intentionally asks for obtrusive and attention hogging, not for useful. The goal is always to push people to generate demand, not sit there when they need something. Thus the repetition, psychological experiments, emotional warfare (surfacing or creating perceived deficiencies, then selling the cure). Now if you understand that the parties funding AI expansion are not Procter and Gamble- level commercial entities but state and sovereign investors, you can forecast what the main use cases may be and how those will be approached. Especially if natural resources are becoming more profitable than consumer demand.
The pragmatic side of me wonders if there is any way to shape this inevitable future now so we might see a better outcome 20 years.
Unplug
In all seriousness. Windows is invaded by copilot, OpenAI introducing ads, Google providing Siri for Apple, it’s all just a collusion to keep you buying. Disconnect. From TV, Media, Ads, Social Networks, Predatory subscriptions, all of it. The only way to show these companies that we are not on board with this is to not participate.
Reddit generates its revenue with schadenfreude, YouTube and AAA games with GenAI (see: Ghibli in Call of Duty, and fast growing AI channels like Nick Invests or Bernard with “Why it Sucks to be X”).
On my shelf from the corner of my eye I see “Understanding the Linux Kernel”. It’s outdated, but it comes from a time of peer review and subject matter experts. I don’t need to double guess if the author is hallucinating or if they’re subconsciously trying to sell me something.
Maybe it’s time we return to books for entertainment and knowledge share.
Vinyl and Paperbacks…
You can work on building LLMs that use less compute and run locally as well. There are some pretty good open models. They probably be made even more computationally efficient.
I am going to offer an unpopular opinion. This is not a bad thing.
Even now there are viable options for a person to pick up a dedicated ( and reasonably powerful ) local inference machine, where time from setup to working is than few hours ( more if you don't want to use Windows.. which is fair ).
Separately, about the chat sessions. For once, those ads could be more relevant than repeat toaster ads immediately after me buying a toaster. But if one is worried about profiling ( and advertising ), one should not using a commercial solution anyway. Personally, I am taking a.. calculated risk.
There is a concern that openai will follow the same path as google, but they can't ( at least for now ) really afford to make chatgpt not useful as this is their only viable product.
I will end with a more optimistic note. This is HN. There are people here, who are likely working on something that does not depend on openai or any of the big providers anyway. It is going to be ok. And if it won't be. Make it so. After all, this is supposed to be your realm. Own it.
People are a bit too eager to jump on the emergence of ads as an indicator that things are slowing down. I view it as the opposite, mostly because of my experience with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. These models are incredible. I think by some definitions they’re already AGI.
So why bake in ads? My hunch is that raising funds privately can only take you so far. To keep scaling, they need more capital and have to go public. Despite all the hype they still have to show _some_ revenue to help justify the valuation they need to keep buying hardware. They are a business after all. Ads to support the lowest tiers feel like a no brainer. People already accept them for search.
“Have you tried the new models, bro?”
I’m convinced that there will be people declaring that this isn’t AGI all the way up to the moment that they become permanently unemployed.
GPT-4 was AGI.
The ads stirs the already murky waters of trust for the answers you get.
I'd pay $0.005 per conversation, provided the payment is not inconvenient, anonymous, and an account isn't required. That in my opinion is the root cause of the problem, people can't pay easily even if they wanted to pay instead of get ads.
I think the next natural evolution after showing ads in chat sessions is providing services where LLMs tailor site content to include ads in real time. Right now you get served a prepared advertisement after the bid is won and the ad for you is selected. With LLMs, both the bidding process and the ad served would be seamlessly integrated with the site content/context.
Part of the "problem" with ads is people know they're ads. What if this comment was edited by HN's servers and rephrased to mention a specific product? You might see a sentence about how OpenAI is the future, someone else might see how claude or anthropic are. Another person might see a paragraph from me about how I used Tide to clean laundry this morning with the help of AI, telling me the right portions for the right cloth. You might suspect it's AI but you won't always be able to tell. Even if they made it more obvious like how reddit is doing it, the content of the AD itself, pictures, text,etc.. could be crafted dynamically so that it embeds in your subconscious without much resistance.
The tech developed to make ads more effective is also used to influence people for other purposes. The current state of society came about after the widespread accessibility of smartphones, social media and the rise of surveillance capitalism. Russia's influence ops using ads is well documented for example. I mentioned all this to say how catastrophic the combination of LLMs and advertising could be, even by today's standards.
Pharma ads as AI health advice will be super profitable. AIs are very engaging and able convince people they have a disease, inadvertently coach them on how to mislead their doctor, and how to fast track diagnosis supporting their specific meds. The only guard is to have detailed manifest of exactly what was used in training. Even that may prove insufficient as "final assembly" has emergent properties. For example, omitting case reports of severe outcomes for a given formulation. Bias can be constructed.
I can't be the only person completely unconcerned about this state of affairs. They're ads. This is the most straightforward incentive structure in the world - they are paid to supply ads on behalf of other companies, and we consume those ads and are, in turn, provided with their product. I don't know why it is, but people are incapable of evaluating this exchange objectively - there's something inherently detestable about advertisement to the human mind. This is a perfectly reasonable exchange.
Besides, if it wasn't for ads, I never would've found out about Zyns, and now I can't stop buying them.
Ads feel good when they’re for something we’re actively in need of. But they usually aren’t, and they are also often scammy or scummy. I bet we’d feel a lot different about ads if these things changed.
Advertisement General Intelligence, at least it still has "general intelligence", this is good enough for me.
Nice read - I can’t seem to subscribe? Getting an error with Buttondown.
AGI can have multiple meanings. Depending on who you ask, it can mean:
"Ads Generated Income"
"Artificial General Intelligence"
"A Google Imitator"
"Absolutely Great IPO"
It is any definition that fits the goal of the original secret definition of "100 Billion dollars in profits" from Microsoft and OpenAI [0].
[0] https://archive.is/nHedH
"it seems that the pinnacle of human intelligence: the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine"
Putting aside the ridiculous hyperbole, the reason is that consumerism is our culture. Our cult-ure. Everything is oriented toward and reduced to consumption. Our worth as human beings is replaced by consumerist criteria and measures. It's why physicists leave research and work in finance where their training is repurposed in service of all sorts of financial jiggery-pokery.
"The A in AGI stands for Ads! It's all ads!! Ads that you can't even block because they are BAKED into the streamed probabilistic word selector purposefully skewed to output the highest bidder's marketing copy."
But note the implication. Sure, ads weaved into the content, but they still must be targeted. And here's the irony of the online existence. People often refrain from expressing various desires in public for fear of judgement. It's why the vitriol online is so much spicier. The world of social media where you can express repressed opinions, the world of games and other ahem media where you can sublimate all sorts of desires and fantasies - all of this is data for the AI machine. These companies, in some respects, "know" you better than the people in your life do - especially those parts of you that you could be embarrassed to reveal in public - and they use this information to manipulate you, largely for profit, but why not for broader social and psychological control. AI's convenience is already irresistible. It's the go-to in Google search.
Even if they raise 10B in ad revenue (an order of magnitude higher than the author suggests) that would still imply a 100x valuation which is insane.
There's still an AI bubble.
There's no question that "AI" is the next advertising frontier. I've been saying this for years[1][2][3]. It is going to be the most lucrative form of it yet, and no "AI" company will be able to resist it. Given the exorbitant amount of resources required for this technology, advertising will probably be the only viable business model that can sustain it at scale.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706981
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36689090
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425948
The exorbitant costs could save us from ads actually. instead everyone will have to pay subscriptions like for mobile phone plans. Haven't heard of the ad-based Rolls-Royce yet.
Paying for a subscription does not guarantee you won't get ads. They could do both.
"for years"? the oldest link in your list is from lat 2023, so.... ;-) ;-)
imqgine that.. a useless slop generator having failed to produce useful output or provide value to the user will now attempt to exploit their attention with ads. how innovative!
I think having mixed economic interests is great when an advertising company is asking you, you execs, your engineers, and consultants to dump whole copies of project planning, business practices, and internal dynamics on their servers…
If I’m looking at ads for your shizz a) why can’t we just pay as a business expense, inline ads and B2B are an odd combo, and b) if this isn’t fully local tech I think there is a real challenge trusting MS or OpenAI to respect their contracts.
We’re not too far past these same dudes running around, violating NDAs, and launching product clones to eat partner businesses. Now ads? … trust? … scorpions and frogs, scorpions and frogs.
Who are you to say LLMs have never provided value to the user? I last used an agent earlier today and it finished a job that would've taken me a lot longer to complete without assistance.
Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To those who believe ads are evil and must be stopped, I ask how the world will work if we kill the freedom to sell space for commercial messages where people can see them.
In general I think the answer could be pretty simple: dedicated marketplaces for products and services, where we go to search for the things we need and want. A humble newspaper contains great examples of good and bad advertising.
Newspapers have whole pages of bad ads, and random bad ads wedged between actual content. Ads have a perverse incentive to mimic the look of actual content, just like on the web. I'd never pick up a newspaper with a goal of "I want to find a tax service" and yet ads for such services are there, unwanted, wedged into other content.
But newspapers also have classified sections, a better kind of ad. They're in a predictable place, where you can go if you need a job.
Imagine if the actual content weren't perforated by a scattershot of ads. Ad revenue would go down, but readership would likely go up. Besides profit motives, it's also a case of the good of the many outweighing the good of the few.
just fine? what do you think would happen/what’s your actual argument against out of curiosity