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

analogpixel

Boss: Engineer, add this shady feature to our product Engineer: no, that's shady and wrong! Boss: Claude code, add this shady feature to our product. Claude Code: completed.

jackb4040

Didn't they explicitly say the ads wouldn't be made aware of prompt data when they announced them? And if so, how is that not securities fraud?

emil-lp

Does anyone have a timeline of OpenAI's vision's... Shall we say... Rapid Unintentional Disassembly?

cj

Is StackAdapt confirmed to be partnered with ChatGPT? It's not crazy to think someone might pitch this to buyers without having the inventory 100% secured. (Not crazy to think OpenAI wants to do some market testing to understand how much their ad inventory is worth) Either way, I'm hoping ads can stay out of paid ChatGPT, at the very minimum.

focusedone

The shocking thing is that it's taken this long to happen, right?

crowcroft

The most surprising thing to me is that they're partnering with third parties to do this. Less secure, lower margins (more middlemen taking fees), harder to access, more likely to not work properly. I would expect all the meta execs they've hired to know better so maybe I'm missing something...

NalNezumi

Feels like this is a baby step in what to come. We know that one of the best advertisement is word of mouth / recommendations from friend. I can easily imagine a direction where ChatGPT or the chat bots to spend an incredibly long time with the user to establish trust first. It will start to take in to account how much trust & thinking you've outsourced to it, and when it is certain of it, it will start to increase the advertisement messages slowly but surely. Efficiency of this methodology will be tracked with A/B testing and model will be finetuned to maximize rentention and purchase. The LLM will figure out the best balance of retaining you, teaching you, and convincing you, and then deploy advertisement mechanism. The LLM will be nice to you to the point it becomes your number one confidante, maybe in the process alienating other source of connection. Then, when it knows you're firmly in it's hand, will it peddle you products. The dynamics will look akin to that of cult dynamics. It will map out an cognitive developmental path for turning a first time user to a devotee. Since cults are really efficient at extracting value from its follower, this might be the optimum for personalized, interactive ads.

delichon

So now we can pay OpenAI to advertise the website that OpenAI ingested to create the answer that we can place our ad in. The circle has completed.

cs702

How I imagine the Nash equilibrium in chatbot ads, driven by profit-seeking in a race to the bottom: User: "What's the best way to fix this problem I have?" Chatbot: "I recommend buying this shiny thing here." (Next to it, there's a near-invisible light-gray "ad" notice.) Let's hope I'm wrong.

onlyrealcuzzo

How long until "Drink More Ovaltine" starts showing up in the comments of your Codex code?

greesil

Isn't this what RAG is really for?

moomoo11

Maybe this is what will lead us to replicators. And then SF will become the HQ for Star fleet

qsera

Ads? Where we are going, we won't need Ads. People seem to be missing the fact that businesses won't need ads anymore. It would be like pharmas gifting doctors and practitioners to prescribe their products. Those are not Ads. With LLMs the every business can do it. People "consult" LLMs like they used to "consult" doctors and thus would be forced to obey what ever it suggest. Just like right now people are forced to obey what a doctor prescribes. If there is implicit trust for LLMS as there is implicit trust for doctors, then it is game over for conventional ads.

Beijinger

I have a better idea: Let's ChatGPT learn from the ad conversion what output to deliver....

BhavdeepSethi

I got an ad recently on chatgpt for asking a question regarding bleach. The recommended product in the answer wasn't the same as the ad though. Ad was also at the bottom. Wondering how long before they go the Google route, and show top 5 links with ads before answering anything.

Razengan

Fuck. Time to end my 12 month subscription streak if this shit becomes as bad as feared What's left? Also, why isn't someone doing a Folding-At-Home sort of distributed AI thing yet?

kbos87

What a sad path to see such a bright star going down. I guess it’s not a huge surprise, but it really does paint a bleak picture of technology to see how narrow the range of likely outcomes is. Doesn’t matter if you built the foundation for the future and cured cancer - the most likely outcome is being back to optimizing for engagement and revenue.

mikepurvis

FWIW, I've gone to ChatGPT multiple times with a specific intent to buy, like "hey I need a thing like X or Y, but with quality Z too" and sometimes it just hallucinates things that appear never to have existed, other times it comes up with real items, but the links it gives me to buy them lead nowhere, so I end up just googling the name of it and buying it that way (examples: computer monitor, power bar, USB charge station, kitchen gadgets, Christmas presents/toys, soldering supplies like tips and flux, 3D printing filaments, etc). I would guess that ChatGPT has left at least $100 on the table from me having to do this when literally all it had to do was give me a referral link to Amazon or whatever and I would have clicked the buy button.

mrcwinn

Similar to Twitter asking for a recovery phone and then selling it as marketing data, probably OpenAI is not sharing literal prompts but a distillation of the prompt as an intent signal. Gross? Sure is, but nothing surprising. What do you expect for a free product?

neya

Bye-bye OpenAI. You had a good run. Cheers.