OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

Man, this thing is going to be so lucrative when they inject ads into it. Imagine how this is going to combine with the parasocial AI boyfriend/girlfriend people, it's going to be worse than hostess clubs. They'll have to invent whole new categories of nonexistant products for the bots to sell.

There’s a special type of frustration when an LLM is close to being useful but just… isn’t.

middlemen taking fees is not the measure for comparison, the question is whether you could run your own ad business for your own platform and keep your costs lower than established players who sell on all platforms. the answer is generally "no"

look how much money coca cola makes, and they sell it cheaper than water and still pay for advertising!! we should all make our own coke and not advertise it...

You pay extra but you just plug in into a framework that already works.

It's also easier to drop the potato if it gets hot.

Switching is maybe feasible for those who have the resources, but the majority will be stuck with large providers. They establish quasi-monopolies, then monetize (with ads). It's the sad cycle of commerce.

This is one of the rare instances where it's very easy to predict the future: the prompt auction market will look similar to the existing online ad market, financial firms will pay for prompt streams for sentiment analysis, companies and interest groups will pay to have their products or agenda included favorably in the training data for future open weights models... any way you can think of that LLMs can be monetized, you will see it happen. And fast. The financial pressure is way too high for there to be too long of a honeymoon phase like we had with web 2.0

In order for it to be securities fraud it has to be tied to a securities transaction and the misstatement has to be material to a reasonable investor's decision.

I’d be more concerned as to how this ends up in agent platforms using the LLMs, when you don’t have a fairly autonomous agent based system using these the entire point is that a human isn’t involved, so who are you serving ads to and where are you injecting them.

Moreover, if you are injecting them everywhere, does that survive stare for subsequent steps, meaning from the first set of results I get, does that loop back in again with the ad injected into the context. Because now, we have yet another dangerous way of injecting instructions into an already issue prone surface area.

I’m guessing they’re going to have special APIs that don’t include ads, and those are going to cost more, especially for non embedded agents (processes that already exist inside ChatGPT that kick off transparently from prompts, like asking it to work with an office document). After all the customers using agents aside from developers are mostly businesses, so it’s where the money is. The ads will exist for the poor to subsidize their use, and probably create even more barriers for agentic use like I described. Just my thoughts.

And good luck litigating against any business in this administration. Unless they explicitly tick off certain people or refuse to kiss the ring, they can get away with almost anything right now and there’s little risk of doing it or not because ticking off this admin will raise illegitimate prosecution even if you’re perfectly legal, almost the same level of if you’re not. It’s the ideal playground for doing all sorts of manipulation, just kiss the ring and you’ll be fine.

"We made a ton more money with ads and the stock went up" lacks that key element of fraud?

And I'm not a tinfoil internet anarchist, but just because Google only leaks user data in aggregated form to advertisers, doesn't mean that they don't leak their user data, it's just that they did so in a legal and responsible manner.

Maybe considering the difference in data volume and intimacy between queries and AI conversations, the privacy implications of advertising merit a difference in treatment, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is lost to a more simple 'Google did this so we can do it too' momentum.

Local llm or nothing at all.

Buried in LLM click-through: By interacting with our LLM, you agree that you are consenting to make all your interactions with us advertising-driven to an extent that you will never know, but that we will determine based on whatever makes us the most money in the least time.

Imagine you have it coding for you and it injects and ad into your product.

ChatGPT is collecting your data fs so advertisers can go ultra niche targeting

Its kinda comical seeing this play out. I still laugh at the deluded fools who think something even close to AGI is here or coming in the future. If that were true, why haven't we seen genius plays from OAI and Anthropic, progressively over-time, if intelligence rises as compute scales up? If anything we are seeing the opposite.

The very first time I see one of these ads, I'm cancelling my ChatGPT subscription. Measure _that_ metric in your A/B testing.

Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants