History is littered with challenger companies chest thumping that they’re never going to do the bad thing, then doing the bad thing like a year later.

"Don't be evil."

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

"OpenAI"

They are using this to virtue signal - but in reality it's just not compatible with their businesses model.

Anthropic is mainly focusing on B2B/Enterprise and tool use cases, in terms of active users I'd guess Claude is distant last, but in terms of enterprise/paying customers I wouldn't be surprised if they were ahead of the others.

See Github, which doesn't have display advertising.

History shows that software companies with large chunk of their platform being Free to Use mainly survive thanks to Ads.

It goes well beyond free to use models unfortunately.

I believe Perplexity is doing this already, but specifically for looking up products, which is how I use AI sometimes. I am wondering how long before eBay, Amazon etc partner with AI companies to give them more direct API access so they can show suggested products and what not. I like how AI can summarize things for me when looking up products, then I open up the page and confirm for myself.

Won't all the ad revenue come from commerce use cases ... and they seem to be excluding that from this announcement:

> AI will increasingly interact with commerce, and we look forward to supporting this in ways that help our users. We’re particularly interested in the potential of agentic commerce

Why bother with ads when you can just pay an AI platform to prefer products directly? Then every time an agentic decision occurs, the product preference is baked in, no human in the loop. AdTech will be supplanted by BriberyTech.

if llm ads become a real thing, let’s acknowledge that this is exactly what will happen in no uncertain terms.

The only chance of that happening is if Altman somehow feels sufficiently shamed into abandoning the lazy enshittification track to monetization.

I don't think they have an accurate model for what they're doing - they're treating it like just another app or platform, using tools and methods designed around social media and app store analytics. They're not treating it like what it is, which is a completely novel technology with more potential than the industrial revolution for completely reshaping how humans interact with each other and the universe, fundamentally disrupting cognitive labor and access to information.

The total mismatch between what they're doing with it to monetize and what the thing actually means to civilization is the biggest signal yet that Altman might not be the right guy to run things. He's savvy and crafty and extraordinarily good at the palace intrigue and corporate maneuvering, but if AdTech is where they landed, it doesn't seem like he's got the right mental map for AI, for all he talks a good game.

There are a number of different llms - no reason they all need to do things the same. If you are replacing web search then ads are probably how you earn money. However if you are replacing the work people do for a company it makes more sense to charge for the work. I'm not sure if their current token charges are the right one, but it seems like a better track.

yeah it’s either that or openai has effected a massive own-goal… im leaning toward your view, but hoping that prediction does not manifest. i would be fine with all sorts of shit in life being more expensive but ad-free… but this is certainly a priviledged take and i recognize that.

My thoughts exactly. They are using the Google playbook of "don't be evil" until it becomes extremely profitable to be evil.

You really think the giant ad company would put ads into their product after saying they won't? You should strive to be less cynical.