- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products
- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)
- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable
I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.
I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.
PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?
> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are
In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.
IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.
IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.
> So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.
every single platform since the 1990's has introduced ads. My kids find it totally normal to have them. Believe me, if you train (!) people to accept ads, they will soon think it's normal.
And besides, if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly. So the users won't have the choice anymore.
But ok, if I have to pay for a service without ads, then let it be. Paying for a service is normal too.
> So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers.
I'm certain the ads will be introduced in an easily identifiable and ignorable way. People will acclimate, user behavior will be analyzed, and over time the dial will ever so slowly be turned up to optimize for draining as much attention and money from the consumer as possible.
> IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI.
Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.
Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.
And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.
they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do
The way that Google is rolling out AI is confusing, and I imagine a lot of people who can access Gemini don't actually know they can or how to use it. Among those that do know, many won't know what it's capable of and will believe that they need to pay for a service like ChatGPT in order to get what they want.
Google the search engine was on a down trend before. And, hallucinations aside, pagerank++ search is primitive compared to an LLM, and I wonder if people won't associate the new "natural language conversation search" to chatgpt more than google now.
Google had a good 10 year run, where the ads were genuinely useful, until the need of the public markets required and lack of competition allowed them to enshitify the experience to the current state.
I hope the same fate does not await ChatGPT but in the mean time I expect it to be a pretty good experience at first.
And yet most of the people I know, including many technical ones, default to ChatGPT before Google's AI Studio. Google has general brand awareness, but ChatGPT has become the Bandaid or Kleenex of AI
I think investors would certainly love this. So why hasn’t it already happened?
My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.
Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.
But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.
After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.
Yup, it’s essentially an admission of failure. I think the people who were expecting AI to improve exponentially are disappointed by its current state, where it’s basically just a useful tool to assist workers in some highly specific fields.
It also is impossible to work properly: either they also screwup the entire API to break everyones programmatic access to coding and regular apps, or else everyone just starts making wrappers around the API to make without-ad-chatbots
If there's one thing the history of mass internet servuces teaches us, it is that people switch to platforms with superior product/experience in an instant.
Remember Lycos, Yahoo, & Hotmail? They all had strong userbases for their time who switched in an instant to Google Search & Gmail.
Even with network effects, it is very difficult to compete without outright superiority - remember Orkut, MySpace, Google Plus or even Facebook? Meta made the right decision buying Instagram and WhatsApp instead of trying to sustain Facebook.
There are no lock-ins in Chat assistants at all and no network effects. All evidence suggests now cutting edge high performance models are mostly coming out of Google, Anthropic etc and high efficiency models are coming out of China. ChatGPT also appears to have a disadvantage in the talent war - mostly because talent seems to not like to work with the management.
Also almost no one I know uses ChatGPT now as their primary AI assistant now because they feel the quality of answers from others are simply superior (I check case by case) and the same seems to hold in more formal tests in AI enabled product development. Even Microsoft has started hedging bets with Anthropic.
OpenAI really really needs to focus on outright superiority or it's going to be interesting to see how the financial shakeout is going to play.
Nah, people using Yahoo are still using it today. What happened was the growth of new users of the Internet in general was so massive, T+1 cohort’s early adopters outnumbered T cohort’s majority. the better product won, it’s just that the friction of switching didn’t matter. Switchers didn’t matter.
Only a short matter of time before agentic tools start serving ads too - paying user or not. You want to refactor your codebase ? No issue - taking 30 seconds - please view this ad meanwhile.
It’s worse than that. It will be more akin to ad placement in movies, except in this case it will slip this proprietary library into the suggested solution instead of that one. Or embed ads in the solution code.
I highly doubt this one. These agents are pretty interchangeable, any one of them could decide to not show ads and steal huge market share. Programming is one of the few areas they can actually make gross margin, so ads would be a terrible business decision given the above. The ad revenue from it would be insignificant against the API calls / subscriptions.
Why stop there? You want to refactor your codebase? Sure, but you need to adopt this dependency and this cloud service.
Mixing Ads or sponsorships to influence LLMs is a really, really bad idea. Especially when they're competing with Search ... which means that for some, "AIs" are the only window into the world when looking something up.
"I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT."
I'm not sure that really is the case. Most non-techies I know use ChatGPT far less than they use Google search, let alone various social media apps they're addicted to.
Perhaps it is a threat to Google search, but I can't see how it's going to be threat to ad revenue from Meta, Youtube etc - the services that are actually addictive due to the content they serve. At least for me there's absolutely nothing addictive about ChatGPT. It's just a tool that helps me solve certain types of problems, not something I enjoy to use.
Trust in LLMs is easily broken, and many users are starting to see the cracks. Once those AI companies start rolling out ads inserted in the answers, the quality will go down even more, and they will burn the last good will of the people.
There is no moat because their only way to make money is to self-destruct.
Talking on a more practical POV, your cost to display the ads needs to be lower than what companies pay you for advertising. And while companies might be willing to pay a small premium for "better" targeting because the LLM supposedly has more personal data about users, the cost to deliver those ads (generating answers via LLMs) is several orders of magnitude higher than for traditional ads served on websites.
So even sticking to a purely technical aspect, ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.
Combine the two aspects, and OpenAI is all but a dead company.
I’m actually one of the people that continue to say even with this list they have no moat, because Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. can just embed a chatbot in their existing products or social network and make ChatGPT irrelevant overnight. Non tech users will chat through their browser, OS, Apps, website, that’ll be served by any model provider. The only moat of OpenAI is investor money to burn so that they can offer it for free.
Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses. Their only path to survival is a massively downgraded free tier ridden with ads. Nobody will use an app like this when they can have a better more integrated experience directly in their other apps.
> Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses.
Nah, it's just one order of magnitude...
Also, they expect revenue to grow exponentially so it's 20 billions annualized by the end of the year. Last time I saw somebody talk about it, it was about half of it, and trending down.
Anyway, if they manage to take ~20% of the ads revenue from Google, they will be able to cover ongoing depreciation! That's the amount of money they need.
> - Extremely personal data on users
- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products
Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? We managed to radicalise people into the rise and fall of entire countries through analog ads, can you imagine how devastating it would be to infuse every digital product with all that?
You know, I thought stories of law enforcement and the military targeting people using commercially collected data, effectively skirting the sanity boundaries we applied to surveillance, would raise a little bit of awareness in the US. It didn’t. Then when the political scene got really into deliberately targeting political opposition, I thought that might raise more eyebrows about all of this data being out there, but it didn’t. Same with ICE and border patrol. I think the risk and mechanisms will remain too abstract for people to grasp until they’re one of the unlucky people staring down the barrel of a gun because they, or someone they were associated with, had the wrong opinions.
It's one of the major issues of our era. Either society will be utterly captured, gradually and quietly, or there will be a reconning and ads will become tightly regulated along the lines of tobacco, sectioned off from polite society.
Would be quite hilarious if the first two companies to buy As space on ChatGPT is Anthropic and Google.
Specially hilarious, since that's exactly how TikTok got all their initial traction from Meta Ads.
Spinning up an all-new ad network is pretty tough. I would think OpenAI would need to beat Meta/Google on basics like CPM in order for the network effects to make it desirable for ad vendors over Meta/Google. Ad budgets are fixed and zero-sum and vendors (in my head, I don't know) would prefer to spend their money on the best network giving the best results. I don't know if ads in LLM chats can get there.
ChatGPT shows a sponsored entry in chat history list with a colorful border around it to get users to click. This product is something that ChatGPT knows the user desperately needs from previous chats. The user can chat directly with the product and learn more about it. The advertiser specifically sent OpenAI information (like a RAG) about their products buyers might have questions for.
When the user is ready, they can open a link to the product's website or just buy directly in ChatGPT.
I thought that most advertisers go through middlemen and do not do business with the ad networks directly? So you only have to make it attractive for the middlemen (of which there are fewer), and that shouldn't be a problem for anything AI-related.
Furthermore, anyone offering some sort of assisted browsing service is automatically in the ad business, regardless what they do with affiliate links in generated page summaries.
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Reddit, Twitter etc all have increasingly profitable ads
I'm sure llm providers will also figure it out in due time. Consumer products are generally a good fit for ads, even if it takes time to reach full potential
They have all the resources anyone could possibly need to do this, including an enormous list of companies who would kill to get their products into ChatGPT. It’s “just” an execution challenge.
Why would they need to beat Meta/Google, and at what game? They just won’t let any other add network work in their app. Voila! You just beat Meta/Google, and they didn’t even compete with them. I guess they could provide some sort of SDK for websites to embed that tracks users, or they could come up with a browser extension that tracks users too. They already have an app that people are freely giving them so much info. Where else could the compete as you suggest? Being a generic ad platform to serve ads not through their app?
Is it harder than spinning up a multi billion dollar data centre network with other people’s money?
Partner branding would be a mechanism to get the ball rolling - and some are big names. Oracle, Shutterstock, BuzzFeed, Bain & Company, Salesforce, Atlassian, Neo, Consensus,
If OpenAI manages to get the agentic buying going, that could be big. They could tie the ad bidding to the user actually making the purchase, instead of just paying for clicks.
My wife and I have android phones. Google pretty much shoves AI down our throats. She probably doesn't know what gemini is but I know she's been using it probably without realizing she's using AI. And she never uses ChatGPT.
Not saying that that makes Gemini better or more popular than Open AI in any way. But it just goes to show that more tech-normies use Gemini than you think.
I just had to fix the phone from a family member that used to shut it down by pressing and holding one of the side buttons, and now got instead an "ask gemini" pop-up.
It’s an entirely different skillset to create technology $x than it is to create a successful ad network. Yahoo is the canonical example. It has been one of the most trafficked websites in the world through most of its history and still wasn’t able to successfully sell ads after the dot com bust.
ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.
Also, I think I remember estimates that it costs 10x as much to serve a ChatGPT result than it does for Google to serve a search result. Not to mention that Google uses its own hardware including TPUs.
ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.
And the ads can be blended seamlessly into generated content.
"You can do this in Postgres, but the throughput will be limited. Consider using hosted clickhouse instead. Would you like me to migrate your project?"
> I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT
Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?
People are being weird about this. ChatGPT has no moat because switching costs are zero. There's no investment into a particular AI service.
ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat. The fact that people will continue to use ChatGPT after some gentle frog boiling is true of any service. Adding ads is going to be a measure of how real people tolerate ads more than anything about ChatGPT. Normal people really don't care that much and it bothers me—and probably most of HN.
The answer is friction. What % of this billion of users will bother to export their chat history (which is already a lot) and import another another llm. That number is too small to matter.
The memories are the moat. Regardless of the current or future capability, most users already view chatgpt as a personal confidant that they are investing energy into building a relationship with. That will be a far stronger moat than anything else
I’ve had a couple of instances where when I describe a requirement, ChatGPT would not list an open source project like n8n and happen to only remember paid alternatives.
It’s an advertiser’s wet dream, being able to slowly creep and manipulate even the most uninterested people into using a product.
And it’s so personalized that ChatGPT may even refuse to tell you about products that are not paying them a cut and this can put out a company entirely out of business, because unlike search engines, the customer might not even learn about your product despite directly asking for it.
This reminds of ads on Amazon Echo and other intelligent devices. I think there was similar hype - not in terms of scale - but on personal data. Many advertisers and their moms were writing skills to tap this market.
It'll be interesting to see how they serve up ads and how it ends up working. Before the initial state is that people will find ways to serve up malware in form of ads and someone might end up writing ublock type stuff to block these ads.
You are 100% correct, and I don’t mean to refute your comment by saying this:
For me personally, the moment AI has ads, I’m out.
I’ve drawn this line with search engines as well. I now pay for a no-ads search engine.
But for AI, I think I’d rather buy some hardware or use my existing desktop PC and run something local with search engine integration.
I know this won’t be a popular option but I think this time around I’ll just skip the ensgittification phase and go straight to the inevitable self-hosting phase.
I second that, trust is broken if there is ads. The line of great ads to weird ads to pushy-borderline-scam ads into personal context is thin.
Hopefully the price of local will go down and maybe apple will be able to push most of it on-device.
The day chatGPT push ads in a conversation I stop using it.
The thing is with llm, it went so fast to get that many users, it means people are used to adopt new stuff as well. With proper marketing and specific feature I won’t be surprised to see people switch service as easily they start using it in the first place because the barrier is so low.
Sam is a habitual liar so I wouldn’t take anything he says seriously.
LLMs are a commodity, once they put in ads people will increasingly move to the other options. It works for Google because they have a moat, OpenAI does not.
There’s a reason they didn’t do this earlier. It’s going to piss people off and they’ll lose a lot of users.
> All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due
That’s the issue OpenAI has: Gemini is “free” with google search and other google services. If Apple get their act together they can provide a “privacy respecting” AI free with every iPhone.
I’ve recently switched from OpenAI as my daily ‘helper’ chatbot to Gemini (I’ve done it with Claude in the past and still use that for coding) and don’t miss ChatGPT. Sure each has quirks and one will release a new version and it becomes the best LLM briefly but to the majority of public and businesses they are interchangeable and the winner is the one that can deliver the functionality for free (because it’s paid for by another service) or into an existing product.
> I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
Game on. The systemic risk to the AI build-out happens when memory management techniques similar to gaming and training techniques that make them usable reduce the runtime memory footprints from gigabytes to megabytes, much of which fits in L2. When that happens, the data center will bleed back to the edges. Demand will find its way into private, small, local AI that is consultative, online trained, and adapted to the user's common use cases. The asymptote is emergent symbolic reasoning, and symbolic reasoning is serial computation that fits on a single core CPU. Game on, industry.
Hopefully this is the point where AI starts to be seen as just a useful tool, as opposed to a sign of imminent AGI. I’ll be glad to hear less rabidly overzealous rhetoric surrounding AI.
I do not understand why the conversation is always about showing ads in chatgpt. Can they not track users there without ads and sell ad space on websites like google ads? Why ruin the experience there when they can highly target ads. I am guessing they prefer both.
There is nowhere near enough money in the ad network business. Like, Google's search ad business is an order of magnitude higher than the ad network, and the ad network has been shrinking in absolute terms for years while the first party revenue has been growing at double digits.
Eh, so.. I don't know if I was in some weird A/B testing group, but I saw lazy reference to real estate ( zillow ) in my chat few weeks ago, which was .. I had to think of a way in how 'not close' it was to our conversations. And the issue is clearly not that it can't profile me. It absolutely can. And I sometimes ask for some explicit shopping comparisons. But what do I get, real estate ad..lazy. Lazy and uninfuckingspired.
Also ads in LLM can be perfectly merged with the content, it'd be impossible to know if LLM tells you something because that's the most likely useful answer or the most profitable one for its owners. Can't be just ad-blocked either, it might be the ultimate channel for ads.
> how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
None of the above requires OpenAI to be around though. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have much stronger brands, and more importantly they each own large platforms with captive audiences where they can inject their AI before anyone else's and have deeper pockets to subsidize its use if need be. Everywhere OpenAI opens up shop (except for Web) they're in someone else's backyard.
And include an ad section within the text. Alternatively, if it tells you something because that company is a sponsor, it could just include an appropriate disclaimer.
They can easily LoRA-finetune each model based on user preferences expressed in the past conversations. That would improve accuracy compared to Google's ad targeting by orders of magnitude.
Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, among others, would have zero issues in ensuring that OpenAI does not grab a market they own; it shouldn't be that hard to bring OpenAI into a position where they cannot recoup their investments, hence going bankrupt.
The big players then would also have the benefit of having those very bright minds being on the market for them to grab. And it's not like OpenAI owns much relevant hardware.
I ask people this. In the UK at least it seems like chatgpt is not so pervasive to the folks I talk to. "Oh that AI mode on Google search?" is potentially more common from "average" people.
I hear that it is very popular in schools though as everyone is always looking for the best way to cheat and ChatGPT got viral that way earlier. Not sure being "the cheating app" is a great look though? Advertisers are very sensitive to the surfaces they are displayed on - do they want to appear in the app being used primarily to cheat on homework?
Yeah I think all of the concerns about ARPU and what the ROI from AI will be are not justified given the opportunity if executed well. LLMs contain high intent significant memory. Their usage is exploding.
Getting $200 subscriptions from a small number of whales, $20 subscriptions from the average white-collar worker, and then supporting everything us through advertising seems like a solid revenue strategy
I think the good news is that open-source models are a genuine counterweight to these closed-source models. The moment ads become egregious, I expect to see and use services for an affordable "private GPT on demand, fine-tuned as you want it"
So instead of a single everything-llm, i will have a few cheaper subscriptions to a coding llm, a life planning llm (recipes, and some travel advice?). Probably it.
Is this data actionable though? Google has way more marketable data on me as I search YouTube for my hobbies and other interests. My LLM could probably sell me philosophy books? The amount of marketable stuff I provide it is minimal, and even the things that are marketable I’m unlikely to click on.
I think the real question is: what are you doing to make it less painful? Full disclosure, chatgpt has a lot on me, but I am using to this time to prep nice local build. It has gotten really nice and current crop of machines with ai395 got really nice ( I almost wrote a short page over how easy it was compared to only few years back ).
I think ChatGPT’s moat is mostly “it’s the first AI thing I used/heard about”. It’s not clear to me that’s enough to maintain their market share if OpenAI is the only one mixing in ads. It does seem to work elsewhere, though; consumers have brand loyalty to a fault, and often for the brand they started with.
The question is how many users have developed intimate personal relationships and have named their ChatGPT, and how many of them would bounce to a different provider if some line is crossed (of which advertising could be one)?
Anecdata isn't data, but I know several individuals who have and thus are even more unlikely to churn than mere brand loyalty on the level of eg Coca-Cola.
They own zero hardware or software stacks. Their AI just got wiped by Google. Unknown Chinese companies release free models that are mere weeks behind them.
Apple can restrict the ChatGPT app on iOS to not sext with users. What's Altman going to do? Cry in a corner?
Hard disagree on the moat. I do tech diligence on "AI startups" regularly and so far have yet to hear of one that has had a hard time ensuring they can use competitors just as easily. Everyone is very aware of that issue, if blissfully ignorant of others.
How would pivoting to advertising change OpenAI’s valuation? Isn’t it currently driven by leading the charge towards global upheaval through AGI? As opposed to becoming a google competitor? Seems like that warrants a different revenue multiple
they're going to compete on ad unit economics against a company whose entire bread and butter has been selling ads. All while increasing unit costs to provide their service (like all the AI companies seem to be doing by just having more and more planning layers)
If ChatGPT went away tomorrow everyone who wanted to would be fine just moving to one of the other random chatbots from one of the other providers. ChatGPT is the default name that people know, but I don't think that's the same as a moat. A moat would allow OpenAI to go really hard on pricing and ads, and I don't think they have that margin!
Google abused their users and customers with intentionally useless results. The more useless the results are the more time users would spend coming back again to search, and the more need there is for businesses to buy ads just to be seen.
They spend $3 for every $1 they make, so they're just living off of investors and government contracts at this point. Their revenue is basically a moot point.
Tried and true Silicon Valley strategy: burn VC money to build a moat, wait until switching costs are high enough, and then enshittify the product to extract rent.
I'm ok with having ads for free users, many of us saw this coming. What I'm really afraid of and knowing how this industry works, AI advising/gaslighting users into buying useless stuff in the guise of advice is NOT ok.
Imagine you ask ChatGPT about coffee beans and it goes into insane detail about finding the right coffee bean and then it slips in a "btw, here's a couple of good coffee bean brands: A, B, C..."
That's super scary since your trust factor with the AI is really high and it already knows it and is actively exploiting it. I would imagine even paid users might be subject to this without them ever knowing/finding out.
This is why open-weight open-source models are extremely important.
How many of those are actual active users though? I created my account when chatgpt 3.5 was launched because it was a novelty but haven’t used it in a long time. I use Claude and Gemini but I’m somehow counted in that 1 billion figure
Everything in tech becomes ad-supported bullshit even if you pay for it. Tech knows no other business model with consumers besides devaluing the product to grow large enough to be another shitty ad platform.
Matt Levine once wrote about OpenAI's business model:
------------------------------------
There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model [1] :
> The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.
It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity. As a connoisseur of financial shenanigans, I of course have my own hopes for what the artificial superintelligence will come up with. “I know what every stock price will be tomorrow, so let’s get to day-trading,” would be a good one. “I can tell people what stocks to buy, so let’s get to pump-and-dumping.” “I can destroy any company, so let’s get to short selling.” “I know what every corporate executive is thinking about, so let’s get to insider trading.” That sort of thing. As a matter of science fiction it seems pretty trivial for an omniscient superintelligence to find cool ways make money. “Charge retail customers $20 per month to access the superintelligence,” what, no, obviously that’s not the answer.
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I agree with the sibling commenter that this move is a sign of OpenAI's weakness. If you really believe you have a superintelligent machine-god (or will have one soon) then "run ads when people talk to it" is not the business model you pick.
In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.
Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
I wouldn't call ChatGPT "brand recognition". People know the term ChatGPT, but I don't think they associate it with OpenAI or any company in particular, in the same way that people might associate Civic with Honda. Instead they'll associate it like they do the terms Bandaid, Kleenex, etc., as a catch-all term for LLM chat interfaces, regardless of who is providing the service. When OpenAI starts ads, I imagine people will start saying "oh, here's a ChatGPT without ads" and point to Claud or Gemini or whatever.
> But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.
I don’t disagree but want to go on the record predicting this will collapse on itself spectacularly and OpenAI will still “fail” commercially
for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product
I think it’s more reasonable to consider Coca Cola as having a significant brand value moat, given that they’re 140 years old and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. That also gets at the other side of their moat: distribution. Coca Cola is available basically everywhere, and a challenger would have to invest massively to simply get in front of as many people on shelves. In that way, other companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta) still have significant legs up on OpenAI. Way too much in play right now to declare any winners.
Don't ask them if they know the model name, ask them if they've used the ai mode in Google search or their phone or Gmail or whatever. "Oh yeah I use that all the time!" is what they usually say to me.
People say ChatGPT has brand recognition but amongst non-students and non-tech in the UK I don't think it is that pervasive at least.
Taking on tobacco was no small task at mid-century, when more than half of men and a third of women smoked. In 1956, the AHA’s first scientific statement on smoking concluded that more evidence was needed to link it to heart disease. But as evidence grew, so did our role. Even before the landmark Surgeon General’s report of 1964, we called for a public campaign against smoking.
By 1971, we said cigarette smoking “contributed significantly” to coronary heart disease, and in 1977, we declared smoking to be the most preventable cause of heart disease.
In the 1980s, with significant support from the AHA, new laws required stronger warning labels for cigarettes and banned smoking on airplanes. Today, we’re working to understand the risks of e-cigarettes and vaping while fighting to keep teens and others from starting.
Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
As if that doesn't already happen? Ugly topics are already restricted. Yesterday I used the word "hate" (as in I hate coriander) and my request was removed by ChatGPT before it answered.
I love this. Now I'll be able to read student papers with ads in the middle. "Are you enjoying our exploration of state Shinto in late nineteenth century Japan? Visit Kyoto with Japan Airlines this summer! Use the code 'JAL26' for special savings!"
I know it's a joke, but the ads will surely be much more stealthy than that. Advertisers are gonna want to drive people to products and websites without it being clear it's actually an ad, like subtle ranking things differently, or trying to nudge users into some direction.
Economically, I don't think that makes sense. Having a call to action that is just clicking a link is much more likely to be taken than a subtle suggestion. The former will be able to make more sales from the same ad spend which will allow them to bid higher on ads, out competing subtle ads.
(smart) advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting on how their ad campaigns are doing, and making ads that are too subtle runs the risk that the customer is being charged for a weakly or sneakily worded message that they perhaps don't like. Also curious how they're gonna generate reliable, deterministic reporting for crafty embedded ads when LLMs are famously non-deterministic.
Luckily we have made plenty of advertising laws in the pre-AI era ensuring that things have to be disclosed quite clearly.
However I'd still bet that OpenAI is gonna be hit with a multi-billion dollar fine from the EU within 5 years of rolling out this feature. And they will pay and move along. Just how big tech works these days.
"Oh no lonely teen you are absolutely correct! Borax does cause incredible harm to the human digestive system, enough to end whatever suffering you seem to be experiencing. Here is a coupon code for 10% off borax, and 20% off funeral services, and 20 cents of bonus crypto if you sign your parents up for InternetBeanz!"
All of these "farewell ChatGPT then!" and "they have no moat anyway" comments here are very strange. Does anyway even remember when Google used to not have ads? The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google. People who say there's no moat should spend 5 minutes on social media. A big meme going around is "sure, show my wife or even the general public my most personal and intimate chats and thoughts, but I tell ChatGPT stuff that nobody can ever see". I don't think anyone was saying the same about pets.com at the time.
> The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google.
Where is this revisionist history coming from? The introduction of ads to Google was not seen as "crazy", in fact it was basically seen as inevitable. And when Google did introduce ads, they were generally praised because ads were highlighted and clearly separated in a different color (yellow) at the top and right rail. Of course, that slowly eroded until ads were nearly indistinguishable from organic results and took up the entire first page, but when they launched I don't remember anyone being surprised that Google added ads.
I think Google as a search engine, back when the started with ads, was really superior to others. (To the point where competitors just didn't find what I was searching for and Google had it in the top three or at least on the first page.) As for ChatGPT's advantage... I am currently subscribed there and not for others... but at least for the software engineering models, OpenAI doesn't seem so far ahead... maybe it's true for other models as well.
Also it's likely that most income for the LLM provider companies will come from third parties or business that integrate APIs. And as long as all the APIs are so similar (and wrapper libraries make them compatible for many use-cases)... nobody has a moat.
This will become even more interesting once business start using the cheapest for each use-case... which often end up being some open and license free model. I imagine this could be a big part of "enterprise workflow automation". Thinking of many office jobs which don't require actual intelligence besides understanding language...
Really?! Startpage, DDG, Brave, Ublock, NextDNS, Proton, Mulvad, and all those similar companies and OSS exist literally because people were infuriated at the Big Tech bait-and-switch tactics.
It's not totally obvious to me that you can get the economics of this to work. A Google search costs ~.04 cents to serve, whereas a frontier reasoning LLM request costs about 2 cents. The revenue from a Google search is also around 2 cents. So the margins are dangerously thin on an LLM.
Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error.
The obvious knob to turn here is that the floor price of ad auctions will be incredibly high, with the justification that AI is expensive.
As someone outside of the ad-tech space it blows my mind how much Instagram and Google ads cost these days, and OpenAI would certainly want to price their ad offering as more “premium” (see: $$$).
The pricing doesn't really work like that - it's more an auction amongst different companies wanting to sell their services so the price comes down to how much the companies make from customers acting on the ads. Which is why you have to pay crazy money to advertise a mortgage for example - the mortgage companies make a lot if they sell one. I think OpenAI could do well at it.
Every Google search request triggers a Gemini request tho.
Which is great… that's why I don't use chatGPT at all, having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO.
I don't know anything about Google's architecture but I would guess that the average Gemini request per search query is < 1, surely there's a lot of caching that can be done and a lot of money to be saved by doing so.
Except Gemini has lied to me about local events, it told me that in my city (specifically in my city, mentioning it by its name) a musical event was happening and I lost transportation time and cost, so it can be pretty spotty.
I suspect that just like with Search, LLMs are used for a number of different action types. One being specifically web search, one being product search and so forth.
Within the web-search and product-search requests there is undoubtedly A LOT of overlap between peoples queries. It would not be unfeasible to have on nice long good answer generated by e.g. ChatGPT 5.1 cached, and first throw the initial user request into some kind of classifier and use a smaller LLM to judge whether the cached answer is close enough to the initial query.
Presumably they'll be embedding commercial influence in the interaction where you have no clue ad dollars are steering the conversation.
That will no doubt have higher value than Google's $.02/search revenue, since the users will be completely incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Aside: this guy regularly posts on the Discord server for an open-source post-training framework I maintain, demanding repayment for bugs in nightly builds and generally abusing the maintainers.
Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information".
Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product.
While that's true even today there really isn't a product that wraps that API that is as simple to use as any of the major chat applications.
I've used OpenUI and it's fine but it's incredibly fiddly to configure and web integration is almost nonexistent (this was as of a few months ago so maybe it's better today).
I don't think anyone would be investing `billions and billions` into AI if their endgame wasn't putting an expert salesperson right in front of every human in the world. Someone who knows all about them and who can not just sell things, but make the target think it was their idea all along.
Readit News
- Extremely personal data on users
- Novel way of introducing and learning more about sponsored products
- Strong branding for non-techie people (most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are)
- An app that is getting more and more addictive/indispensable
I think OpenAI is going to kill it in ads eventually. This is why Meta and Google went all in on AI. Their lucrative digital ad business is in an existential threat.
I think people who kept saying there is no moat in AI is about to be shocked at how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
All free LLM chat apps will need to support ads or they will eventually die due to worse unit economics or run out of funding.
PS. Sam just said OpenAI's revenue will finish at $20b this year. 6x growth from 2024. Zero revenue from non-sub users. What do you guys think their revenue will end up in 2026?
In think the point is that they don’t need to know what Gemini is, they just need to know Google, which they most definitely do.
IMO ads rollout won’t be as simple as you’re describing it. A lot of people have switched from Google search to AI specifically because it isn’t filled with SEO, ad filled nonsense. So they’ll need to tread very, very carefully to introduce it without alienating customers. Not to mention mollifying advertisers who are nervous what their product will be shown alongside and OpenAI will probably struggle to offer iron clad guarantees about it. And people generally speaking don’t like ads. If competitors like Google are able to hold out longer with no ads (they certainly aren’t wanting for ad display surfaces) they might be able to pull users away from OpenAI.
IMO pivoting to ads is a sign of core weakness for OpenAI. Anyone trying to set up their own ad network in 2025 has to reckon with Google and Meta, the two absolute behemoths of online ads. And both also happen to be major competitors of OpenAI. If they need ads that’s a problem.
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every single platform since the 1990's has introduced ads. My kids find it totally normal to have them. Believe me, if you train (!) people to accept ads, they will soon think it's normal.
And besides, if ChatGPT goes with ads, Google will follow directly. So the users won't have the choice anymore.
But ok, if I have to pay for a service without ads, then let it be. Paying for a service is normal too.
I'm certain the ads will be introduced in an easily identifiable and ignorable way. People will acclimate, user behavior will be analyzed, and over time the dial will ever so slowly be turned up to optimize for draining as much attention and money from the consumer as possible.
That's actually changed a while ago.
Yeah, I've had the same thought for a while now. You don't sell investors on an endeavor for 10s of billions of dollars with the endgame being "sell ads". If that was the endgame then there are a lot less resource and capital intensive ways to get to it.
Given all of the discourse of "you need this new tech in your life to continue to participate in society", I would not have expected them to need to stand on the roadside trying to get people to buy low cost fireworks. It smacks of going through the sofa for loose change so you can make rent.
And if they had something impressive coming down the pipeline I would think they could get someone to spot them a few billions yet, unless the billionaire/megacorp economy is really that tapped out.
The way that Google is rolling out AI is confusing, and I imagine a lot of people who can access Gemini don't actually know they can or how to use it. Among those that do know, many won't know what it's capable of and will believe that they need to pay for a service like ChatGPT in order to get what they want.
I hope the same fate does not await ChatGPT but in the mean time I expect it to be a pretty good experience at first.
My guess: they would lose a ton of cultural cachet.
Turning OpenAI into an ads business is basically admitting that AGI isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Yes, I know people will make some cost-based argument that ads + agi is perfectly logical.
But that’s not how people will perceive things, and OpenAI knows this. And I think the masses have a point: if we are really a few years away from AGI replacing the entire labor force, then there’s surely higher margin businesses they can engage in compared to ads. Especially since they are allegedly a non-profit.
After Google and Facebook, nobody is buying the “just a few ads to fund operating costs” argument either.
Regardless of AGI, being known as the only LLM that introduced ads sounds very bad.
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Remember Lycos, Yahoo, & Hotmail? They all had strong userbases for their time who switched in an instant to Google Search & Gmail.
Even with network effects, it is very difficult to compete without outright superiority - remember Orkut, MySpace, Google Plus or even Facebook? Meta made the right decision buying Instagram and WhatsApp instead of trying to sustain Facebook.
There are no lock-ins in Chat assistants at all and no network effects. All evidence suggests now cutting edge high performance models are mostly coming out of Google, Anthropic etc and high efficiency models are coming out of China. ChatGPT also appears to have a disadvantage in the talent war - mostly because talent seems to not like to work with the management.
Also almost no one I know uses ChatGPT now as their primary AI assistant now because they feel the quality of answers from others are simply superior (I check case by case) and the same seems to hold in more formal tests in AI enabled product development. Even Microsoft has started hedging bets with Anthropic.
OpenAI really really needs to focus on outright superiority or it's going to be interesting to see how the financial shakeout is going to play.
Mixing Ads or sponsorships to influence LLMs is a really, really bad idea. Especially when they're competing with Search ... which means that for some, "AIs" are the only window into the world when looking something up.
,,Allow Vercel to use credit card stored by OpenAI''...click to continue refactoring
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this_variable_is_sponsored_by_coinbase = 42
I’m just exaggerating … I hope.
I'm not sure that really is the case. Most non-techies I know use ChatGPT far less than they use Google search, let alone various social media apps they're addicted to.
Perhaps it is a threat to Google search, but I can't see how it's going to be threat to ad revenue from Meta, Youtube etc - the services that are actually addictive due to the content they serve. At least for me there's absolutely nothing addictive about ChatGPT. It's just a tool that helps me solve certain types of problems, not something I enjoy to use.
There is no moat because their only way to make money is to self-destruct.
Talking on a more practical POV, your cost to display the ads needs to be lower than what companies pay you for advertising. And while companies might be willing to pay a small premium for "better" targeting because the LLM supposedly has more personal data about users, the cost to deliver those ads (generating answers via LLMs) is several orders of magnitude higher than for traditional ads served on websites.
So even sticking to a purely technical aspect, ads might simply not be profitable when integrated in LLM answers.
Combine the two aspects, and OpenAI is all but a dead company.
This is wishful thinking.
Companies are using LLMs for development. The ads are not for a $50 throw pillow, they are for a $10k monthly business-critical service.
Consumers might not be worth advertising to (although I doubt it), but B2B ads - absolutely.
Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses. Their only path to survival is a massively downgraded free tier ridden with ads. Nobody will use an app like this when they can have a better more integrated experience directly in their other apps.
Nah, it's just one order of magnitude...
Also, they expect revenue to grow exponentially so it's 20 billions annualized by the end of the year. Last time I saw somebody talk about it, it was about half of it, and trending down.
Anyway, if they manage to take ~20% of the ads revenue from Google, they will be able to cover ongoing depreciation! That's the amount of money they need.
Doesn’t anyone think this is really, really bad idea? We managed to radicalise people into the rise and fall of entire countries through analog ads, can you imagine how devastating it would be to infuse every digital product with all that?
I mean I do. And you do. Probably a lot of people in this thread. I felt that way about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on.
I think you're right that these ads will be, in a sense, worse, but not by the metrics that matter to OpenAI.
I consider the latter unlikely.
"Here's a reply from our sponsor Anthropic: [...]"
Here's an idea that just popped into my head:
ChatGPT shows a sponsored entry in chat history list with a colorful border around it to get users to click. This product is something that ChatGPT knows the user desperately needs from previous chats. The user can chat directly with the product and learn more about it. The advertiser specifically sent OpenAI information (like a RAG) about their products buyers might have questions for.
When the user is ready, they can open a link to the product's website or just buy directly in ChatGPT.
Furthermore, anyone offering some sort of assisted browsing service is automatically in the ad business, regardless what they do with affiliate links in generated page summaries.
I'm sure llm providers will also figure it out in due time. Consumer products are generally a good fit for ads, even if it takes time to reach full potential
Partner branding would be a mechanism to get the ball rolling - and some are big names. Oracle, Shutterstock, BuzzFeed, Bain & Company, Salesforce, Atlassian, Neo, Consensus,
Not saying that that makes Gemini better or more popular than Open AI in any way. But it just goes to show that more tech-normies use Gemini than you think.
It must be some "upgrade" I guess?
ChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs.
Also, I think I remember estimates that it costs 10x as much to serve a ChatGPT result than it does for Google to serve a search result. Not to mention that Google uses its own hardware including TPUs.
Independent analysis: Inference is very profitable. https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re...https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
"You can do this in Postgres, but the throughput will be limited. Consider using hosted clickhouse instead. Would you like me to migrate your project?"
Given one can (at least for the moment) export one's entire chat history from ChatGPT, what exactly would stop a ChatGPT user from switching to an alternative if the alternative is either better, or better value?
ChatGPT has mindshare but that's not the same as it being a moat. The fact that people will continue to use ChatGPT after some gentle frog boiling is true of any service. Adding ads is going to be a measure of how real people tolerate ads more than anything about ChatGPT. Normal people really don't care that much and it bothers me—and probably most of HN.
- Switching effort
Word of mouth usually works just with one vendor at a time.
They just use Google, with "AI Overview" at the top. Google's in a strong position still.
Claude, I agree. IMO that's why Anthropic is so heavily focused on coding and agentic tasks -- that is its best option (and luckily, not ad-based)
It’s an advertiser’s wet dream, being able to slowly creep and manipulate even the most uninterested people into using a product.
And it’s so personalized that ChatGPT may even refuse to tell you about products that are not paying them a cut and this can put out a company entirely out of business, because unlike search engines, the customer might not even learn about your product despite directly asking for it.
It'll be interesting to see how they serve up ads and how it ends up working. Before the initial state is that people will find ways to serve up malware in form of ads and someone might end up writing ublock type stuff to block these ads.
For me personally, the moment AI has ads, I’m out.
I’ve drawn this line with search engines as well. I now pay for a no-ads search engine.
But for AI, I think I’d rather buy some hardware or use my existing desktop PC and run something local with search engine integration.
I know this won’t be a popular option but I think this time around I’ll just skip the ensgittification phase and go straight to the inevitable self-hosting phase.
However you will have to pay the full true cost of each token. Not the promo pricing like we have now or the ad-subsidized plans that will be offered.
HN users run adblockers.
The usual estimate is that people who run adblockers are with $0, so don’t worry about them.
Now — normal people did not used to run adblockers, although in my circles (young demographic) that has changed more than I expected.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-26/snapchat-s...
LLMs are a commodity, once they put in ads people will increasingly move to the other options. It works for Google because they have a moat, OpenAI does not.
There’s a reason they didn’t do this earlier. It’s going to piss people off and they’ll lose a lot of users.
That’s the issue OpenAI has: Gemini is “free” with google search and other google services. If Apple get their act together they can provide a “privacy respecting” AI free with every iPhone.
I’ve recently switched from OpenAI as my daily ‘helper’ chatbot to Gemini (I’ve done it with Claude in the past and still use that for coding) and don’t miss ChatGPT. Sure each has quirks and one will release a new version and it becomes the best LLM briefly but to the majority of public and businesses they are interchangeable and the winner is the one that can deliver the functionality for free (because it’s paid for by another service) or into an existing product.
Game on. The systemic risk to the AI build-out happens when memory management techniques similar to gaming and training techniques that make them usable reduce the runtime memory footprints from gigabytes to megabytes, much of which fits in L2. When that happens, the data center will bleed back to the edges. Demand will find its way into private, small, local AI that is consultative, online trained, and adapted to the user's common use cases. The asymptote is emergent symbolic reasoning, and symbolic reasoning is serial computation that fits on a single core CPU. Game on, industry.
People are valuating it for "skynet is around the corner" not "we're going to kill our product by polluting our answers and inserting ads everywhere"
> how strong of a moat there actually is for ChatGPT.
None of the above requires OpenAI to be around though. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have much stronger brands, and more importantly they each own large platforms with captive audiences where they can inject their AI before anyone else's and have deeper pockets to subsidize its use if need be. Everywhere OpenAI opens up shop (except for Web) they're in someone else's backyard.
- Ad
-
And include an ad section within the text. Alternatively, if it tells you something because that company is a sponsor, it could just include an appropriate disclaimer.
Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, among others, would have zero issues in ensuring that OpenAI does not grab a market they own; it shouldn't be that hard to bring OpenAI into a position where they cannot recoup their investments, hence going bankrupt.
The big players then would also have the benefit of having those very bright minds being on the market for them to grab. And it's not like OpenAI owns much relevant hardware.
Let's see where we are in 3-4 years.
Just like how people used to say 'google it'
They now say 'look it up on chatGPT'.
They have the cultural mind share which is more important than anything.
I hear that it is very popular in schools though as everyone is always looking for the best way to cheat and ChatGPT got viral that way earlier. Not sure being "the cheating app" is a great look though? Advertisers are very sensitive to the surfaces they are displayed on - do they want to appear in the app being used primarily to cheat on homework?
Getting $200 subscriptions from a small number of whales, $20 subscriptions from the average white-collar worker, and then supporting everything us through advertising seems like a solid revenue strategy
So instead of a single everything-llm, i will have a few cheaper subscriptions to a coding llm, a life planning llm (recipes, and some travel advice?). Probably it.
Is this data actionable though? Google has way more marketable data on me as I search YouTube for my hobbies and other interests. My LLM could probably sell me philosophy books? The amount of marketable stuff I provide it is minimal, and even the things that are marketable I’m unlikely to click on.
Anecdata isn't data, but I know several individuals who have and thus are even more unlikely to churn than mere brand loyalty on the level of eg Coca-Cola.
People hate ads. I have changed from ChatGPT to Grok and have felt absolutely no difference in my usage patterns, just getting better answers.
Every competitor has cloned ChatGPTs UI/UX and API, so hopping between competitors is a no-brainer. There is no moat.
They own zero hardware or software stacks. Their AI just got wiped by Google. Unknown Chinese companies release free models that are mere weeks behind them.
Apple can restrict the ChatGPT app on iOS to not sext with users. What's Altman going to do? Cry in a corner?
How much did their profit grow?
ChatGPT knows more about my medical than my doctor.
If ChatGPT went away tomorrow everyone who wanted to would be fine just moving to one of the other random chatbots from one of the other providers. ChatGPT is the default name that people know, but I don't think that's the same as a moat. A moat would allow OpenAI to go really hard on pricing and ads, and I don't think they have that margin!
My wife just makes a google search with her “prompt” and doesn’t use ChatGPT.
There might be a moat, but there are also extremely well funded competitors that make this moat a lot smaller.
And this is a good progression. Google search results were just turning to garbage. Facebook was just a slurry of noise.
ChatGPT is actually helpful and useful.
“Google Gemini” is the No 2 ranked app in the Apple App Store (behind ChatGTP) and has been for some time
Dont forget to call it progress.
Imagine you ask ChatGPT about coffee beans and it goes into insane detail about finding the right coffee bean and then it slips in a "btw, here's a couple of good coffee bean brands: A, B, C..."
That's super scary since your trust factor with the AI is really high and it already knows it and is actively exploiting it. I would imagine even paid users might be subject to this without them ever knowing/finding out.
This is why open-weight open-source models are extremely important.
Not dead yet.
But definitely bleeding.
CharGPT lost 15-20% market share to Gemini in second half of 2025.
------------------------------------
There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model [1] :
> The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.
It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity. As a connoisseur of financial shenanigans, I of course have my own hopes for what the artificial superintelligence will come up with. “I know what every stock price will be tomorrow, so let’s get to day-trading,” would be a good one. “I can tell people what stocks to buy, so let’s get to pump-and-dumping.” “I can destroy any company, so let’s get to short selling.” “I know what every corporate executive is thinking about, so let’s get to insider trading.” That sort of thing. As a matter of science fiction it seems pretty trivial for an omniscient superintelligence to find cool ways make money. “Charge retail customers $20 per month to access the superintelligence,” what, no, obviously that’s not the answer.
------------------------------------
I agree with the sibling commenter that this move is a sign of OpenAI's weakness. If you really believe you have a superintelligent machine-god (or will have one soon) then "run ads when people talk to it" is not the business model you pick.
Note that the second paragraph about god was the author's opinion. It seems like Matt Levine was wrong to make fun of Altman here.
In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.
Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.
for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product
People say ChatGPT has brand recognition but amongst non-students and non-tech in the UK I don't think it is that pervasive at least.
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Dead Comment
Like it might not want to tell you about negative health effects from McDonalds, if McDonalds becomes a major source of ad revenue
A missing one: smoking.
At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.
They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
> A missing one: smoking.
> At some point, it was revealed that Big Tobacco was a major contributor to the AHA.
> They now list tobacco as a big risk factor.
https://www.heart.org/en/bold-hearts-the-centennial/100-year...
Taking on tobacco was no small task at mid-century, when more than half of men and a third of women smoked. In 1956, the AHA’s first scientific statement on smoking concluded that more evidence was needed to link it to heart disease. But as evidence grew, so did our role. Even before the landmark Surgeon General’s report of 1964, we called for a public campaign against smoking.
By 1971, we said cigarette smoking “contributed significantly” to coronary heart disease, and in 1977, we declared smoking to be the most preventable cause of heart disease.
In the 1980s, with significant support from the AHA, new laws required stronger warning labels for cigarettes and banned smoking on airplanes. Today, we’re working to understand the risks of e-cigarettes and vaping while fighting to keep teens and others from starting.
Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
doubleplus good
However I'd still bet that OpenAI is gonna be hit with a multi-billion dollar fine from the EU within 5 years of rolling out this feature. And they will pay and move along. Just how big tech works these days.
(that said, big companies have proven to be very effective in disregarding laws anyway)
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Where is this revisionist history coming from? The introduction of ads to Google was not seen as "crazy", in fact it was basically seen as inevitable. And when Google did introduce ads, they were generally praised because ads were highlighted and clearly separated in a different color (yellow) at the top and right rail. Of course, that slowly eroded until ads were nearly indistinguishable from organic results and took up the entire first page, but when they launched I don't remember anyone being surprised that Google added ads.
This will become even more interesting once business start using the cheapest for each use-case... which often end up being some open and license free model. I imagine this could be a big part of "enterprise workflow automation". Thinking of many office jobs which don't require actual intelligence besides understanding language...
Which is why I have adblock now.
I just got my first advert in the chat, it launched a shopping research unrelated to what I was talking about.
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Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error.
As someone outside of the ad-tech space it blows my mind how much Instagram and Google ads cost these days, and OpenAI would certainly want to price their ad offering as more “premium” (see: $$$).
Which is great… that's why I don't use chatGPT at all, having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO.
Within the web-search and product-search requests there is undoubtedly A LOT of overlap between peoples queries. It would not be unfeasible to have on nice long good answer generated by e.g. ChatGPT 5.1 cached, and first throw the initial user request into some kind of classifier and use a smaller LLM to judge whether the cached answer is close enough to the initial query.
combine this with the fact that i have disposable income.
i can't fathom how much advertisers are willing to pay to put themselves in front of my eyes vs a google search for "dining table"
Go on something like openrouter with gpt 5.1 and use the chat then check the billing and you’ll see an average joe query is like 0.00102 or something.
You’re quoting figures from articles for initial ChatGPT release in 2022
That will no doubt have higher value than Google's $.02/search revenue, since the users will be completely incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff.
However, if you find yourself encountering these types of situations often, you may wish to protect yourself with software like NordVPN.
NordVPN is...
Still it saddens me that we will be sitting here in a years time and discuss our experiences of being fed ads served as "objective information".
Today if I ask: "should I buy a store product or just use raw material X?" , gpt and others will gladly say you might as well just use the raw product.
Pretty sure that will change very quickly.
I've used OpenUI and it's fine but it's incredibly fiddly to configure and web integration is almost nonexistent (this was as of a few months ago so maybe it's better today).
So are all the comments addressing those? Nah it's all just people bitching about AI.