7 years ago we started the 'you are not the product' movement for digital information consumption with Kagi Search. Since then the paradigm shifted from search to agents. Good to see the need for 'you are not the product' still holds up, maybe even more so now: an agent is only worth trusting if it works for you and nobody else. The second an advertiser gets between you and the answer, that's gone. So we're staying on the user-funded side of this. Boring, but it's the whole point.
Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster. Knowing there are no ads and results are higher quality removes a mental load I didn’t know I was carrying.
It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.
Thanks for everything, and please keep doing what you’re doing.
You know who else sounds like LLM from time to time? ESL - English as a Second Language. People learn English from books, and get introduced to phrases through reading or interacting with others within the same community. So, it sounds like you're using the LLM argument as a way to diminish their voices as well.
As an ESL person who has spoken English as their main language for two decades now I find this very interesting. The vast majority of my English has been spoken with my wife who used to be a marketing VP or in a professional context. Sometimes people complain about the ways politicians or corporate executives talk and I don't get it and to me it sounds totally normal because that's what I'm used to. Makes you wonder how ESL speakers will sound more and more like LLMs because that's a large part of their exposure.
It's only correct if "your right" is used as in "his right", "her right", "their right". Usually what they mean is "you are right", ergo "you're right", and they are just not educated enough to know how it's spelt.
I'm a customer of Kagi who is in no way affiliated with Kagi, other than sending them money. I agree with bayindirh: It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.
I know that we live in a world where tech increasingly sucks, and positive comments on tech are (correctly!) seen as suspicious. The thing, though, is that Kagi is genuinely just a great product, and search is such a central part of using the Internet that good, trustworthy search makes a huge difference.
That's the rub. Today on the internet, no one can validate that there exists any "trustworthy search". If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it. Most often that someone is a marketing person at the hosting organization. Occasionally it's a random comment on the internet behind a pseudonym we know nothing about.
People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.
> If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it
That's what trust is, though. I find Kagi worthy of trust since I have no evidence that they are doing anything that would violate my trust in them, and their incentives align with mine. I give them money, they give me good search results.
> People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.
I do not believe that this is good. Democracies are built on trust. Without trust, they die, as we can plainly see in the US right now, where people are so distrustful of each other that it is starting to destroy the very fabric holding together society itself.
The entire point of the Constitution was to not trust each other. We wouldn't even need checks or balances if trust were a reasonable governing philosophy. Nor a Bill of Rights, nor any explicit admonition against slavery.
The reason we need these and many more is that we don't trust each other. And it's wise that we don't.
This doesn't mean trust is bad, only that the founders, rightfully, knew that it leads to complacency.
What's landed us where we are is not a lack of trust. (We've lacked trust from day one, that's how we got the Constitution in the first place). What's landed us here is complacency.
It's distrust - in foreigners, in each other - that got extremists elected, and it's distrust - in the media, in the institutions - that gives them unchecked power to destroy the country.
None of which would have happened if we had not gotten so complacent about defending our democracy through vigorous enforcement of the Constitution, and voting in a fashion more informed by wisdom than emotion.
At the root of all you lament is not lack of trust, it is complacency. Decades long complacency.
Lack of trust is what our republic was founded on, and the entire reason it was structured the way it was. Our republic is specifically designed to function in a trust-free environment.
But no republic, nor any other organizational construct, no matter how well designed, will survive complacency.
Kagi's business model also aligns incentives better than an ad and/or data mining fueled business model. Of course, this isn't proof, but it is evidence. One can also try the search in areas that one knows deeply and compare it to other search engines to see if it's truly better (I have not done this, but it is possible and isn't just trusting marketing.).
I don't use Kagi primarily because I'm quite averse to subscriptions if I can find another way.
Yeah that one was praising in a non-specific way. Whether or not it’s genuinely a user, it did feel like astroturfing, which is sad if it’s a real comment that they can’t compliment a good service.
This one is so short and only has one LLM-ism, it's entirely possible it was human, I'm 60/40 on it. Unless you are 100% sure it was LLM, please don't call it out.
Reading LLM's all day makes me really cynical, and I have to suppress the urge to judge all text written in that sense. SO I get where they are coming from, but people need to consider that they can be wrong, and that there is a real person whose feelings you can hurt by saying "OH this is like LLM, gotem!"
I can relate, because I also try to understand whether the text I'm reading is written by a human or emitted by a model constantly, and I don't use any LLMs day to day.
On the other hand, I'm not new in the internet, and have relatively thick skin. I'm very amused today by the unintentional attention I got with my cloudy, morning brain.
Nevertheless, regardless of what we do, believe or say, we shall be kind first and remember https://xkcd.com/438/ dearly.
This is what I'm trying to do all the time, but I'm not perfect. Just a human, trying his best.
That comment was obviously LLM authored but it is true. Using Kagi really does feel like taking off a huge weight. Or generally any service where you're used to being the product and then you become the customer instead.
I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further. Same for image search which can also filter out AI generated images.
Also, I find lenses very useful (which is a way to limit your search radius) to search for specific things in the specific parts of the internet. i.e. you can define a lens with specific websites for a subject, and if you need something precisely, you can only search these websites.
I recently started to use SlopStop reporting to weed out AI generated webpages from search results, too.
Lastly, all AI features are opt-in. No summaries, no widgets, no extra "bells and whistles" if you don't want on your result page.
> I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further.
I had an annual Kagi subscription that I let lapse not long ago. That was hands-down the best feature, so I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates it for DuckDuckGo. DDG also lets you turn off ads.
I'd gladly return once they fix the integration issues. In Safari, the redirect via the extension is a bit wonky at times.
Thanks for your opinion about my opinion of a service and its effects on my life.
If you can provide me your contact details, I'd love to send my similar comments to you and get them cleared by you to satisfy your standards of endorsement.
For your information and entertainment, ZeroGPT returns 97% human for that whole comment which I wrote while having my breakfast and my phone was laying on the table.
Keep fighting the good fight. Also, offering a counterpoint for the sibling comments: Yandex results are the most valuable for the type of thing censored in all other search engines. If I want to search for news on the war on Ukraine I go anywhere, but the things yandex works for are censored everywhere else.
yes. Remember when google brought the cencoring "because it's only used for cp and we need to protect the ch1ldren, don't we? or are you one of the pps?"
And now they are cencoring everything.
Like somewere was a page of tiktok removing requests by country and holy-lheehlll, every day, constantly.
Yes, please do. Your support of Russia is the only reason why I stopped using Kagi and paying for Kagi. I really want to like you and use your product.
If you consider supporting a Russian company equivalent to “supporting Russia”, then I assume you are happy to be supporting the United States by using US services… like the one you are on right now.
Also, people seem to be oblivious to the existence of the neo-cloud: Nebius whose services and servers, a lot of western AI companies use. Nebius was spun out of Yandex 2 years ago to assuage the "supporting Russia" allegations and is still run and managed by an ex-Yandex crew. By that measure, I suppose using a lot of western AI tools is also equivalent to "supporting Russia".
Yandex is especially tightly coupled to the Kremlin from what I've gathered. It seems less like supporting some American indie game development studio and more like supporting Palantir.
Good thing we have Kagi in the middle to firewall it from us, then. It does genuinely return better results for westerners due to not being subject to western censorship. I assume Kagi is smart enough to, say, down-rank or ignore Yandex results when the search is about Ukraine
No, there's a reason there's a pretty large "buy European" movement in Europe right now and why I compared Yandex to the US white-house-adjacent Palantir.
Sigh. This kind of whataboutism derails all discussions online.
First, there is no requirement for "consistency". Every person chooses where to draw their moral line. The world is not black and white, but the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and subsequent (ongoing!) murdering, raping, and bombing of civilians is pretty clearly on one side of the line in my world.
Note that this in itself says nothing about the United States or any other country. You may consider every other country and choose not to support its economy, and this in no way makes the above point weaker.
It is not really inconsistent. Despite all the flaws of the current US government, USA is still a relatively free democracy. Russia is a full-blown fascist dictatorship. Russia is also a much more acute threat to me than Trump's USA, because I am from central European country formerly in Soviet Union's sphere of influence, that would be next on the chopping block if Ukraine falls.
* "Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic", from the NIH - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/
FWIW I don't think anything Kagi is doing is unethical. If I did - if I did feel it was unethical to spend money at a company that is in a country that does war crimes - I'd also have to feel that almost all spending was unethical, including things like buying lunch.
On a secondary point, if we want more ethical things to exist, we have to create them. If we want an ethical alternative to Mullvad it's on us to do it.
I think the situation you're in affects what you can reasonably do and hence what can be considered "ethical". You cannot opt out of paying taxes (and buying lunch), but it is possible here for me to avoid funding this war and try to seek better alternatives.
Did you go out of your way to buy a non-Chinese-made phone? You technically have a choice there, but not much of one. About as much of a choice as you have in the search engine business.
Mullvad has tried to paint it as, "this does not represent Mullvad the company, this is a private political donation" and stuff like that. I don't buy it. Funding Mullvad funds the CEOs.
This comment is just unbelievable. With Kagi "canceled" you're back to use your regular search engine powered by the sociopaths destroying the world. But hey, at least your 5 bucks didn't go to Kremlin!
Half the screen is the kagi sign up ad. Not a good show of the product.
Then it’s all black on white. 2026. Color. Contrast. It’s one of the pillars. Google figured this day 1:Dark blue links. Then the line spacing is too high. Information density doesn’t feel right.
I'm on Android and honestly love how it looks, but you can blue-ify your links and change the line spacing if you want. Settings > Appearance > Custom CSS and you can do anything your heart desires.
I've been a kagi subscriber for a few months now, and I really want to recommend Kagi to everyone, but the results and index (so far) have been sadly lacking.
I had to use post-nerf, post-lobotomy 2026 Google in quite a few cases.
Kagi likes to hear of searches that don't work well and it's worth sharing on their discord[1]. I have problems with searches there too, and I'm too lazy to share, so I'm kinda being a hypocrite but maybe it'll help.
I want to continue to use the enterprise products paid for with billions of dollars of investment, because they still have tremendous value.
Similarly, I want to continue to use the platforms that have all the users, content, and network effects.
BUT - I'd like my own personal agent to sit between everything and strip out the nonsense before it hits my eyeballs.
Ad block used to be good enough, but we can clearly take this much further.
Ads are not the only toxic thing. The algorithm is. Attention seeking from any entity is. The whole internet is adversarial, not just one screen of one product.
An agent could sit between us and the web (or us and our apps) and strip out all the ads, strip out all the clickbait, filter out all the negativity, algo-spam, and low-value content. Calls to upgrade, cookie banners, MrBeast, whatever.
I want an agent that knows me and acts on my behalf as I browse the internet. It should see everything in my browser (or even everything on my screen) and whittles down the bullshit before it ever reaches me.
This kind of tool could focus the whole of the internet into perfect crystal clarity - into an internet whose only objective is to serve me. Certainly not an internet that can make me mad or that tries to convince me to buy things.
Something flexible like this goes beyond just search. It fixes everything on every corner of the internet.
If we treat this as a technology/browser/OS problem, then it can fix everything wholesale. I can continue to use the social media platforms and technology everyone else is using, but I won't be subjected to the bullshit. I don't have to switch to Kagi or BlueSky or whatever small alternative tries to go up against titans, loses the network effects, and winds up as smaller, less-functional offering.
A butler-like agent is a new pane of glass. An internet condom. A judge, jury, and executioner whose only goal is to make sure one stays focused and happy.
This is a product I would pay a thousand dollars a year for.
> Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.
This is an unjustified blanket opinion. Sometimes, societal problems can be solved by technological progress. I think you simply lack imagination if you cannot think of any societal problem that would be solved by better technology.
For example: the current societal problem of not doing enough against climate change would disappear if we developed cheap fusion power and/or very cheap grid-scale batteries that would remove the intermittency issue from renewables. Such power sources would quickly replace fossil fuels simply due to better economics, no need to change society to care about climate change anymore.
You know, the laws of thermodynamics. Every machine generates heat. For example datacenters generate megawatts of it.
Even though you do have less greenhouse gases to trap the heat, you will be pumping more of that heat into the atmosphere, seas and oceans, warming everything up.
You're removing one aspect of climate change but not all aspects of it, still affecting the climate and ecosystems.
Also, for example, we still can't fly passenger and cargo planes with electricity for now, so you won't be able to remove all greenhouse gases, yet.
Look at the data [0]. Yes, energy production and heating is the biggest contributor, and even if you manage to remove it completely with the transportation sector via electrification, half of the emissions are still there.
> Even though you do have less greenhouse gases to trap the heat, you will be pumping more of that heat into the atmosphere, seas and oceans, warming everything up.
The amount of heat pumped out by humans this way is so miniscule compared to natural flows that this is a complete non-issue on a global scale, and will be for a very long time.
Sure, so then what does society do with all of the cheap energy? Human nature is still there. Among other things, leads directly to discarding even more plastic junk wherever it’s convenient and no one complains too much.
Recently Animats replied to one of my comments and brought "Megawatt Racks" to my attention.
I work at a datacenter. We provide compute resources to researchers, and while our datacenter is not small or low energy, one of our systems have Green500 certification and we try to do things as efficient as possible.
When I look at our racks, some of them are DLC BTW, and imagine each of them can pack a MW system now, I shudder. Not because of us, but what AI datacenters gonna do with that energy density and how much heat will these systems put out.
"We need most of our population working full time to keep ourselves fed because running a farm is really hard" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with fertilizer and the cotton gin or whatever.
"There's a bunch of us now and barter isn't cutting it anymore" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with coinage and banks or whatever.
"The internet used to be fun and useful but now it sucks" is a societal problem, not a technical one. You can't solve it with a federated twitter clone or yet another secure messaging protocol or whatever.
What? Why? Why would those first two be "technical problems" that we can "solve" with innovation, but that last example isn't? What makes something a technical problem vs. a societal problem?
Generally, if you're targeting behavior of the people or the masses, you're targeting a societal problem.
People bullying other people is not a technical problem. People driving dangerously is not a technical problem. People shoplifting is not a technical problem. All of them have different reasons deep down, and preventing the symptom doesn't solve the problem.
When you effectively prevent bullying, the bully might damage something else or may do self-harm to soothe their demons. Same for people driving dangerously or have to shoplift to survive.
When you cure the root problem, which is generally harder BTW, the problem you're technically trying to prevent disappears, too.
Not even a little bit. Every example given has immediate first order causes and effects that are both technical and societal. And the second order effects are even more entangled. The example of a societal problem given (online bullying) is itself enabled by technology! And there are online spaces where technology solves it.
We are highly adoptable, highly social creatures whose behavior is greatly impacted by our environment, which includes the people around us, the culture in which we live, and the things that technology enables (or prevents) in that environment.
I just think there’s no bright line at all between societal and technical problems, they’re just labels we apply based on our internal views of how they should be solved.
> I just think there’s no bright line at all between societal and technical problems, they’re just labels we apply based on our internal views of how they should be solved.
So, people rushed to propose technical solutions to this. I noted that on-device ADB was the primary vector for sideloading applications and touted as the "ultimate solution" to Google's tightening of Android ecosystem.
Now, the ADB door is closing, yet people are proposing technical solutions, but the problem is not technical in nature. Google's mindset and agenda is restricting Android step by step, and the trend will continue.
At every step, Android power users adapt, will find new technical workarounds and comfort themselves, but the problem is not technical in nature. No technical solution can stop Google from closing this doors because decisions are managerial and rooting from human-nature.
So this is a great example to what I pointed out. Technical solutions can't solve societal problems. The problem is not restricting ADB. The problem is Google's desire to restrict and close-down Android ecosystem. You can't solve it with a patch, but maybe relieve symptoms for a short amount of time.
If one considers this solving, then it's just deluding yourself.
> People driving dangerously is not a technical problem.
Complete bullshit. This problem can be completely solved by a technical, not societal solution: actually working self-driving cars. Once they are available, all your imperfect societal solutions to the problem are not needed anymore.
I don't believe many understands the complexity of a self-driving car. It's not like programming a couple of agents with simulated sensors on a computer.
That future is not here yet, but my point still stands: once they are sufficiently developed (it's only a matter of time, perhaps 5 years, perhaps 20 years), your societal problem suddenly has a technological solution. QED.
"Sufficiently developed" seems like a cheap proof. There are still many non-technological problems above and below it.
For example, how do you ensure everyone on the road has a self-driving car? We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.
> We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.
Just to further support your point, sufficiently developed electric cars' batteries still doesn't have the energy density of fossil fuels, so they can't replace any and every use case.
For example, can we carry or generate the energy these cars requires to move unimpeded like ICE vehicles yet? Or, did we improve the procedures and materials so these cars can be extinguished faster, more reliably and securely then their previous generation counterparts? Or did battery recycling methods became cheap and efficient enough yet, so we can reuse these batteries and at least not increase mining on our planet? Etc. Etc.
I'm not against renewables or electric cars, but even in their current form, we need to solve many problems to make them more practical and even less impactful when compared to their ICE counterparts.
Didn't I? I have given a direction as a reply. Telling that the road you're planning to go down is not the right one. I have offered you a pruning pattern for your decision tree in your mind, urging you to think on what you have proposed and look at it with a critical eye.
I have offered you to look for other examples, or find a way which has been traveled less or at least ponder on "why?" of this comment. Somebody else did down below, asked for clarification. Somebody beat me to it with a much better example then I can think at that very moment, adding more context and information into my comment.
I don't know you, your circumstances or preferences, hence dictating the way is neither the wise thing to do, nor it's my responsibility to begin with, since you didn't ask me about my opinions about the right way in the first place.
There's help everywhere who dare to look, or explore the the thing they have found and ponder on it. You have a mighty thing in your skull. A brain, a mind. Use it and explore its potential. It might not be easy in the beginning, but it'll be rewarding at the end.
We have an agent between us and the web. It's called a web browser. Or in last millennium terms, a user-agent. You can customize it by installing extensions, unless you chose to use Chrome, where extension support is limited.
People have been trying to use technology to solve the problems technology since this began.
Your solution is probably the worse pipe dream I've ever seen articulated.
You state that current alternatives are too rubbish because you want to use the services you seem to despise. And your willing to pin your hopes on yet another technology to do it because this one is definitely trustworthy and has your best interests at heart... Naivety doesn't quite cover this.
People here are myopic because of focusing on screens and/or books during early childhood. It causes your eyes to mis-detect the shape they need for optimal focusing.
You solution is to hope that a better technology will be invented that won't be subject to what every technology before it has been subject to. You rally against "the algorithm" and beg for another algorithm to save you. You want to live in a filter bubble and not be challenged on you believes. I can't think of anything worse, but I wish you the best.
Also I don't know what comment you read but it's clearly not mine...
I only have so much energy to reply to all of this negativity. Half of it is being cut off at the legs by HN filters from the constant downvotes and flagging. Downvotes and flagging for attempting to be positive and excited about tech progress.
You're not going to do anything about big tech by sitting on the sidelines. I don't see anyone doing anything about it. Nobody's built websites that show people how to contact their legislators. Nobody's building alternative tech.
We have a chance to use this tech to cut off the big tech overlords. I don't see how you're all missing this. We can literally build new browsers now. It reasons that we can place filters at every level of the stack to catch the stuff we don't like and prevent it from reaching us.
For people who supposedly care so much about tech and privacy and digital freedoms, I just see complaints.
I propose a solution to neuter big tech and you label it as a filter bubble instead of a victory.
But you're probably right - I'd like to filter out every grumpy HN person with a negative outlook sentiment score and move on with my day. It'd save me time. I shouldn't be wasting any energy responding to this den of depression.
Negativity does not equals disagreement. I disagree with you I'm not being negative. I can't speak to downvotes and flagging.
Also I find it ironic that you would state no one is building alternatives when you previously lambasted the alternatives (blue sky, kagi, etc). What are you doing? Apart from engaging in fantasy.
Your solution is to have big tech filter out the stuff you don't like. These agents are a product of big tech. They need massive resources in terms of money, hardware, and resources to run. This isn't tech for the poor and downtrodden, it's tech for the rich and privileged. By the time the poor can afford it (if it doesn't destroy the environment first) it'll already be infected by what you despise in current big tech; if it isn't already.
Kimi is open weights and you can rent cloud compute cheaply. It's only going to get more affordable.
Once a proof of concept exists you can distill it down to something that might execute on CPU alone.
With open weights models you can build systems that rend big tech apart.
Last-gen tech has been tried for twenty years. It's not working and it has never gotten distribution.
You know what does work? Adblock. It reasons that we could build a new form of it.
I would pay for someone to build this because I'm busy building other things. I would literally commit money to anyone who suggests they would build this.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up
One thing that was an eye-opener (to me) is just HOW MANY people that I'd put quite high on the intelligence/worldy knowledge graph had ZERO inclination or propensity to even notice or CARE about the bright red AD box around something on a search result.
Made me realize that advertising will always rank somewhere below prostitution (at least there you ARE paying to get screwed).
I guess for a while we'll have the "premier cable channels" effect. You pay not to get ads.
How will you be sure the results from the LLM still aren't injecting ads when you pay? Find a trusted provider who is serving an open weights model.
Although I guess in the near future, we'll have GLM-7.x updates that claim all kinds of performance improvements, but the only real motivator to release model updates is to continually retrain them to push the latest products.
Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.
Yeah, I don't mind these ads, just as I didn't mind ads on Google when they first came out. But once you have ads, there's huge monetary pressure to make them more effective over time, which inevitably ends in ads that pretend to be organic content.
Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
better business model than whatever anthropic is doing. internet exists only because of ads: ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority. has been proven several times, any other way does not survive.
The internet exists because people wanted to connect their machines, before ads. It would still exist without the ads. Smaller maybe, with less content, and less business opportunity for investors. But the internet would survive without ads, because of how useful it is to connect globally.
It rather feels to me that ads are destroying the Internet. The Internet did just fine before everything was full of ads, and it was a much better place.
> better business model than whatever anthropic is doing.
going after business is a more secure long term recurring revenue source. Its boring but it works. It just doesnt justify trillions of dollars in investment
> ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority.
Lmao look at the revenue per user of any ad platform, now look at the stock price of AI companies.
If you think that they can only rely on ads you should short them with every cent you have. Because they are worth 1/100 of their current valuation.
And I dont even disagree with you, but ads in LLMs are a nail in the coffin to the "replace 16% of the entire US workforce" which is their current valuation.
Another ad delivery platform will make them as valuable as facebook, not as valuable as 1/6 of the world economy
It will be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers" until you pay more than ads. After that you will be the product and you will have to live with it.
Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) was a turning point in the American Civil War, marking the end of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's second invasion of the North. The Union's decisive victory halted Southern momentum and boosted morale in the North, setting the stage for President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which redefined the war's purpose as a fight for freedom and equality.
Much like the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola, which unites people across boundaries, Gettysburg united the Union cause, rallying the North to continue the fight. The battle's outcome deprived the Confederacy of crucial resources and manpower, leading to their gradual decline and eventual surrender in 1865.
You can't fight this battle in the current judicial system. If before anyone can successfully bring a lawsuit in front of a judge the company has unlimited money, then at least one of these three things will be true:
a. the damages won't make a dent
b. they can throw lawyers at the problem for the win
c. they will have grafted their way into the economy so deeply that no one will want to kill their main source of income
This battle is already lost, if they find economical success then they are untouchable.
Can confirm in the Netherlands also. I'm not an influencer so I don't know exactly, but a few years ago there was either a crackdown, an expansion of the rules, or at least a big media campaign by the government to make the influences that focus on a Dutch audience aware of the rules surrounding promoted content
As long as the fine is cheaper than the earnings, they'll keep on doing it. And fines are retroactive, at that point they've already broadcasted to and influenced a bunch of people.
I am also worried about this. Typical ads are already devastatingly effective against most people, causing incalculable distortions in market dynamics and incalculable losses to consumers. This is an order of magnitude worse.
But there is something even more insidious: elections. Ads will be purchased to shape public perceptions. Those with the deepest pockets will have ads which are charismatic, convincing, and unbelievably effective. This is the death of democracy if regulation isn't adopted right now.
Unfortunately this isn't straightforward. The distinction between a product, service, person, and party are impossible to clearly delineate. Is a SpaceX ad an endorsement of Elon Musk? Is an Elon Musk ad an endorsement of the U.S. Republicans? The famous Citizens United ruling determined that there is no practical legal distinction in this domain, meaning that without a Constitutional amendment (which will never happen in this political climate), the U.S. is going to barrel headlong into some kind of dystopia.
My only ray of sunshine here is competition. If OpenAI gets a reputation for untrustworthy AI, and there are viable competitors, people will hopefully switch. It's messy and imperfect and will require constant vigilance (because they're not going to tell us when they're misleading us). I think open weights models have become very good, and will improve much more over time. When we can reasonably run these models locally, ubiquitously, we have cost effective options.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -Dune
I wish we would stop speedrunning this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain.
Look into the Adbusters organization. I'm not sure I agree with them on everything, but they have created some excellent satire over the years and been involved in prominent protests.
ChatGPT is way above typical CPM, maybe $60-$100. That puts it in the same category as premium YT verticals. If they can sell enough at this price point it would make a big impact, but I'm super-doubtful they can do that; campaigns are basically blind at this stage, and I would not be surprised if this was intentional.
From the article, it looks like ads are separate from answers in a clearly delineated way. It's not quite as nefarious as what you're suggesting. Frankly, I'm surprised.
This is only round one however, and I could see a future where they offer more "intimate" experiences. At least that's not today.
But it what's the solution to free services? There is many people that can't afford to have to pay for search, emails, maps. On top of paying for accessing content, micro transactions. For Internet related companies what if the country the person is from, doesn't have access to the financial system of the country that company is operating from.
I think It might be better to regulate them than remove them. Or to find a solution for people that can't access it.
(Another is higher tiers, free for personal users etc)
I hate ads but I also think about what's the alternative
If it's like the commercials in the movie the Truman show I think this could be a nightmare.
I think it all boils down to how (if?) this will be transparent to the user.
If the response suggests a sponsored product/service to the user it could either be the specific product/service that ChatGPT is biased to suggest or the whole idea of using a product/service.
As a user I would like to know both of these biases to understand that using any product/service for my need might not even be the best thing.
Ah, so you are against ads! At least the way ads are today. With that I mean that the way ads today mostly focus on manipulating over informing is effectively hindering your ability to choose.
> Ah, so you are against ads! At least the way ads are today. With that I mean that the way ads today mostly focus on manipulating over informing is effectively hindering your ability to choose.
Speaking as someone who worked in advertising for a looooonnnngggg time, there are three ways that ads seem to work (above a randomised holdout).
1. The ad is something that the person actually wants, and they then convert.
2. The ad is something that the person was about to buy, and they convert.
3. The ad is part of a long running campaign that shifts (some) consumer's behaviour over time (ads for Coke etc fall in this category).
Ads aren't magic, and most people ignore them most of the time. It turns out that enough people don't that they can be profitable sometimes, but mostly that's just targeting people with more money than sense.
This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.
When I walk around my increasingly billboard-infested hometown. I observe that almost every ad actually nudges me in some way: whether I should switch internet providers, whether my financial strategy is fine, what kind of scam this tabloid newspaper is running, etc...
I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.
My best defense is to build a resentment towards the companies being advertised.
> I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.
Your feelings are fair, but if this were the case then we'd see far more consumers changing their preferred phone/electricity/TV provider on a regular basis, and we could correlate this with (lagged) advertising spend.
But there is very little evidence for this. Like, I have a doctorate in psychology, and behaviour change is really, really hard and only works in a small number of cases. That model does seem to have predictive power, in that very few people convert as a result of seeing an ad (less than 1/1000 in the very best cases), and most of those that do don't keep buying products for long.
Now, if you already do something (like order takeaway pizza) it's much easier to get someone to do more of that, but its very very very hard to establish a new behaviour.
Anecdotally, lots of intelligent people I know like to pretend to be completely uninfluenced by advertising, which I think is delusional.
In my view advertising is in big parts (your category 3) basically a constant side-channel attack against peoples minds, eroding decisionmaking and purchasing decisions (mostly!) to peoples detriment.
The net-beneficial aspects (product information, and, arguably, boosted general demand) could be better achieved otherwise.
Your explanation should be common sense for anyone who has been around long enough and I agree that it seems to be fashionable to claim that ads have a nefarious, hypnotic effect on The Masses. The thing that does seem to have an outsized effect on how people think is their desire to be seen as part of a group and they tend to signal this by repeating arguments they've heard members of that group make. That's where advertising/propaganda has a real foothold in everyone's psychology. If you form a parasocial bond with an influencer or a group it does have a strong effect on your behaviour since you want to be liked by them so you will say and do things you think they'll approve of and agree with what they say and do. No one is really exempt from this since being exempt involves complete isolation and/or extreme disagreeableness. The only real remedy is having strong bonds with other people who aren't hopelessly beholden to outside influences. No small task since it only takes one member of the group to act as a channel.
> The thing that does seem to have an outsized effect on how people think is their desire to be seen as part of a group and they tend to signal this by repeating arguments they've heard members of that group make. That's where advertising/propaganda has a real foothold in everyone's psychology.
Monkey see, monkey do. This is basically how human society works, and is impossible to stop. The best you could do would be control who people hang around with, but even that is almost impossibly hard to make work.
> This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.
Same. They've also never really bothered me, especially billboards and street advertisements. I was actually sad when they got rid of the neon signs in Hong Kong.
Which category is it when the user asks which is the best brand for the thing they want to buy and the platform lies to them and recommends the brand that paid the most money?
Concealed advertising is highly problematic and deserves discussion. It is not, however, what OpenAI introduced in the article above. Their current ad formats are, apparently, transparently labeled and clearly separated.
It is very likely that this will adjust in the future. Just look at how indistinguishable from organic content some prominent ad placements have become over time. But: There is merit in discussing the actual product, not some hypothetical version of it. If we do discuss hypotheticals, we should make that explicit.
This also helps the whole debate (and therefore, I believe, ad critics): arguments grounded in reality are usually far more effective than those that aren't. ... And there might come a point where OpenAI introduces some kind of native ad format. We would be well advised to preserve our credibility for that discussion.
edit: Paid content in the organic LLM output is a current problem already. It ist just not what this announcement is about.
> Unpopular opinion: I think users should be free to choose.
There is nothing unpopular about your opinion - silent majority definitely wants ad-subsidized free tiers (that is why they are so popular and ads are not banned anywhere in the western world), it is just that arguing with radicals on HN or reddit is exhausting and a waste of time in general.
If you are implying that this is the case because this is also how leaders are selected in a democracy, then of course the sarcasm is noted - but here's my real unpopular opinion: Democracy only has value when the majority of voters are not morons. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a better solution - maybe create a model for which there is a wide agreement on and let it rule?
I simply meant that users ought to be free to choose between a product that offers a free ad-supported tier and one that is paid and ad-free. And I do believe that letting morons choose for themselves is the lesser evil.
It doesn't really matter what the system of government is, power-hungry psychopaths will always attempt to game the system in their favour. The history of governance is just a long arms race of inventing new systems to thwart them while they do everything they can to corrupt those systems and concentrate power in themselves. It's like fending off griefers in an online game, there's an endless supply of them, they don't care about the rules or the game, they just want to dominate other players for their own perverse enjoyment. The only lasting solution would either be some form of genetic modification to remove that trait from humanity entirely or some perfect way to identify them but you'd have to be extremely careful that they didn't gain access to and corrupt those things before they were completely eliminated.
I prefer "Democracy only has value when the majority of voters are informed". This covers your case, but it also redresses the balance to shift blame away from everyday people and onto society as a whole.
Isn't society made up of everyday people? While I agree that the public being informed is a mutual responsibility, placing that responsibility on the government (which in many cases has plenty of incentive to keeping people ignorant) will not work either.
> placing that responsibility on the government will not work either.
I agree, but a) the responsibility is on us all: citizens, government, and the media b) we can definitely introduce regulations that force government to be more open, etc.
That's not a unique attribute of democracy nor is it guaranteed. Any system of government that hasn't succumbed to corruption and factionalism will have clear rules of succession. Even an absolute monarchy can go on for many generations without bloodshed.
At least in this configuration ads are separate from answers. I fear there will come a time where ads will be intermingled in the response tokens. In fact SEO people on SEO forums have been talking about how to inject products into training for many months; but at some point the model operators will offer this directly.
Funny that people still perpetuate the myth about boiling frogs; they absolutely jump out at a certain hot enough temperature regardless of how slowly it is heated.
I think it's impossible for these ads not to eventually get incorporated into responses. There is a class of people who treat an LLM as their super smart best friend who they talk to about everything. It's a level of intimacy and influence that no technology company has ever had before. Do you think that it's possible that a publicly traded (I know OpenAI isn't publicly traded at the moment but they are trying to IPO) company with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize returns wouldn't use this intimacy and influence to make money? It's not just an ad for a new toaster, it's your best friend who you trust about everything telling you that the toaster he's recommending is the world's best toaster, as selected by a being with superhuman intelligence. Obviously not everyone will react this way, but for people already undergoing AI psychosis or at the beginning stages it will just make things worse.
Does that matter? AI companies seem more concerned with scaling at any cost regardless of laws broken because once they're big enough they're too central to the economy to face any real consequences.
This is different as the victims of this crime would be large enterprises with lawyers on staff, rather than a diffuse agglomeration of all the world's writers.
A $1.5Bil settlement just went in on stolen content used for training. It's arguably many times larger in long term damages especially compared to investment into those who stole the content.
If an AI company can scrape in billions of investment and keep going vs Facebook style "cost of doing business" fines, they will make that bet. If OpenAI can inject paid content, advice, misinformation, etc and keep operating or earn revenue today, it's worth doing. There are no ethics beyond optics.
I'm not saying these AI company CEOs would sell their mothers for more runway cash. But also nobody has seen their mothers since the second Sunday in May.
Copyright infringement used to be illegal in the developed world, then we started building exceptions for AI. There's no reason to expect this won't happen for advertising laws too.
They'll simply copy Google's playbook. First, clearly highlighted as advertisement results, usually the first three, so just with muscle memory you'll scroll down right away. Then they get bigger. Then the highlighting gets removed. Then it's just a tiny badge saying "advertisement".
This is something that I noticed after doing a Google search on a new machine without uBlock Origin installed. I was unable to identify that the first link was an advertisement to a competitor's product of the brand I looked up. I remember adverts used to be highlighted really well in Google searches earlier.
If I am unable to differentiate between an ad and a search result then neither can a lot of non technical users including my parents.
This already has a name — people call it GEO/AEO. I do the legitimate end of it for my own site: structured data, clean factual pages, llms.txt, so that when an assistant answers a question in my domain it cites the source correctly. Right now the incentives are healthy, because the only way to "rank" in an answer is to be genuinely accurate and citable.
Paid placement inside answers breaks that alignment. Why invest in being citable when you can buy the token stream? Search took about fifteen years to fully make that trade. LLMs seem to be starting on it in year three.
Interesting that this was flagged when it is about the exact phenomenon being discussed, as I was also about to mention AEO until I read this comment. It is really not very different from SEO in that if you want your site to be ranked, it should have clean information, and don't try to game the system as otherwise you'll be banned like Google has done for decades now.
The golden age of LLMs may be coming to an end. Soon we’ll see the same phenomenon as we have with Google Search results and with YouTube, with Facebook and Windows.
People will rend their garments and lament the loss of the „old models” but the logic of the system that produced them will remain unchanged. Everyone will keep asking themselves how it happened and what can be done about it.
Meanwhile the Claude that we have today can explain this to you if you know how to prompt.
The YouTube golden age is right now. The content is the most varied, from super niche 2k views a video vloggers to massive terrestrial channels alternatives. To the point where I think creative poverty of established fields is caused by younger creatives being on YouTube and TikTok instead of writing rooms at old media.
Windows has fallen off hard but Linux has never been better. The personal computing in general has never been better: OLED screens, dark modes, everything runs on virtually every platform...
The only thing we've really lost is the Internet community. Eternal September turned out to be truly eternal and then went on steroids. But the tools? Never better.
I replace Windows with Linux on my last Windows computer this week. A mixed bag of old motherboard, new-ish graphics card etc. I think I would have had a hard time to get an acceptable usage experience without using an LLM to guide me through the hiccups. (Odd window manager boot problem, sound device issue). But I agree, the Linux ecosystem seem to have something for everyone and on modern hardware it behaves relatively well. LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.
> LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.
Isn't that partly why I would imagine Linux is better than ever? I'm a relatively technical person compared to some of my peers and without LLMs I just wouldn't have the time to sit and toy around with search up what random errors mean, why things aren't working, why things are crashing, making a forum post and waiting for a response or searching through stack overflow.
If you gave two people with no other knowledge of computer access: Kubuntu and Windows 11
I'm sure they'd have an easier time with Kubuntu, and this gap has been widening for quite some time in the favour of KDE.
The largest issues seem to be either power users doing esoteric things to their systems, or people who want to work the Windows way.
Drivers (for as much as I can tell) are mostly solved, with some minor touch buttons on some laptops being an issue in some cases.
I'm not comparing Linux of 2007 to now, I'm comparing Windows now to Linux of now- the only real edge Windows has going for it is that it's already installed when you buy your computer.
I generally agree with you (I'm typing this on a laptop running Void Linux), but I do still keep a Windows laptop for gaming and music production - I've tried running Bitwig Studio on Linux, and it's easier on Windows. While I've heard good things about gaming on Linux/Steam on Linux, I've never bothered to try it myself, being content to just use Windows PC for gaming :)
For me the main thing is Windows has gotten so bad that I was finally willing to spend time getting Linux running. LLMs are nice, but not necessary. Claude helped me with a driver issue at least knowing where to look but the answer was ultimately on a Linux forum. I think LLMs help but it isn't that much better than just searching old forum posts.
At least for me, the availability of LLM help had nothing to do with my decision to switch to Linux, it was Proton making it to where games run great on Linux and Windows being intolerably bad.
The actual content yes, but the recommendation engine switching from "Here is a video that is kind of like this one, you might like it" to "Here is a video that we predict will keep you on this website for as long as possible" definitely soured the experience.
I like that sentiment and fully agree regarding YouTube. Unlike Facebook, it's still possible to tune your feed to your exact interests. I have never had a better experience with any video medium, neither linear TV, nor streaming, than I have with YouTube right now.
Instagram is now much better for this with its "customise your algorithm" feature. I was able to strip out all the crap it thinks I like and focus on one specific topic.
If no one can find it, you basically have a modern digital version of the "if a tree falls and no one hears it does it make a sound".
Discoverability in youtube is currently absurdly shit. The algo just decides you like something and shows you the exact same videos you have already watched 30 times. Its so so bad, specially with how good the front page and side recommendations used to be.
Now its a fight of shorts, repeated videos, AI garbage, and search ignoring explicitly your request.
Maybe it's your algorithm then because I found lots of great stuff that it surfaced to me that were not just repeats but adjacent topics. For example if I watch Veritasium I get videos about other math and physics topics and creators.
The front page is by design around 60% videos you have already watched. Best case scenario.
It used to be 9 videos in 3 rows of 3.
now its 2 videos, then 5 shorts.
In the side bar the default was "Related" which was almost always new videos, directly related to the video you just watched. Now its a tab called "All" which aggregates related tabs such as "Watched" which again is videos you already watched. Content from the same channel (not necessary related to the current video)
All of this hides possibly related videos and narrows down discoverability.
it also ignores the push of youtube to reduce visibility of things (the front page being mostly shorts by volume is pretty telling)
LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
These all feel incredibly shallow now. A few dedicated people could build these systems and begin dismantling the margin and monopoly of every major piece of software we know and use.
If ChatGPT has ads, how hard would it be for a different startup to offer an LLM alternative?
Distribution and branding might be the only things that matter going forward. We may have just turned the tech industry into the 1960's cigarette industry.
LLMs are a Google killer. I don't think it'll be long before people start using their power to take away market share from big tech.
Big tech laying off so many senior engineers might have created the dry kindling to set this off.
(Because people always comment - this is not sarcasm. I'm being serious.)
They will run into many problems. The Google brand for search, the inability to index most of the web as a new crawler, the lack of the top browser, your own mobile OS, default search placement deals with everyone. And that doesn't even look at the technical issues, scaling or the lack of a business model to pay for it.
You could build your own Google drive many have from dropbox to mega or onedrive. Doc suite is possible but harder then you think.
LLMs were invented by people working at Google. LLMs won't kill Google it will offer them a new profit center.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
yes, an LLM can write you a web crawler.
whose hardware are you going to run it on? what is the bill for that storage and compute going to look like, just to get to a baseline where you can answer a single general-purpose query?
Google famously sells ads to subsidize its search product. how are you going to bootstrap your ad revenue? and how much capital are you going to burn through while you do that?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
many open-source clones of GDocs / GSuite already exist. many predate the LLM era and were human-written.
can your LLM slop-fork them? certainly.
but those existing clones already have a niche marketshare compared to Google's behemoth. what reason do you have to believe that yours will be any different?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
hoo boy this one is the most detached from reality of them all.
for what hardware?
iPhones are famously locked-down, so you're probably going to be running on Android.
you can fork AOSP and call it Diordna if you want. you could even use good ol' search & replace to save some money on tokens doing the rename.
or, do you want to run it on your own custom hardware? head over to Shenzhen with a binder full of ChatGPT printouts showing your hardware design?
and again, how much capital are you going to burn through, in order to have your first "could be sold to a real customer" quality device?
This comment just goes to show that tech people definitely aren't business people barring few exceptions, therefore thinking like a tech person will not actually solve a business problem.
I'm earning $3m run rate from a business I launched in February and I've signed a few hundred thousand in monthly commitments for a new B2B SaaS I'm launching soon.
Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. If you don't have the vision for it, then fine. Someone else will take the opportunity.
Good for you, but generally engineers do not have the vision. And whether you have your business or not has no bearing on the questions you asked, the scale is monumental over your 7 figure business.
It isn't just about building an alternate cheaply, it is about convincing people to switch. I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying, just that building the thing is just the beginning of a long journey.
Haven't you heard? Ideas are cheap. It's the execution that will make or break you. Are you the first who thought, "Google is successful, let's just go and clone their business"?
The hard part is indexing the vast seas of the web. You need a large pile of cash to do that. One of those cases where running the software is harder than making it.
And once you've spent your large pile of cash, you're probably gonna want to earn it back somehow. Your competition doesn't charge for search, and your whole raison d'etre is to not serve ads.
Golden age for whom? For crazy valuations, possibly ( though I am oddly unsure about that despite obvious crazy money inflow ). But for actual users, the fun is merely starting man.
Genuine question, was this comment written without opening the link? Because I can't see how you've come to this conclusion unless you're skipping several steps. The ads in TFA still look like ads to me.
"ads will no longer look like ads" (in the future). Ads are clearly marked in the first step, but will likely be more and more blended over time (or worse, biasing the model and therefore the output itself). That's the logical future, because that's better for the advertiser, which is the paying customer.
Yeah, that would be a problem. Luckily, the actual post we're discussing isn't putting any advertising in the model.
This is a very important distinction to make -- complaints should be be about what is happening, and should distinguish that from what is not yet happening and should not. Because beyond the maxim that we should try to deal in facts... if OpenAI thinks people can't tell the difference anyways, they'll be justified in thinking they may as well just do the thing they're already being accused of doing.
Why would you think that? An ad supported product has misaligned incentives, everyone can see that and that's why the confidence erodes from that moment on.
You're living in the era in which saying "Stallman was right" is a dead cold take. Every big tech company sold out exactly like the hippies told you they would back when Google was a dream place to work for and Meta was still a twinkle in zuk's eyes.
Now, well, if you do the same exact search, at least in my location (and with UBlock disabled) it's frankly a mess but must admit that sponsored links are not even the first thing you see. There is the AI result, then the Wikipedia result, then some random result, then the sponsored block with a flat headline separating it and then the organic results, I presume.
There are plenty of cases where the media, including newspapers, have avoided reporting or other content that would negatively affect their advertisers. So yes, newspaper ads do imply media bias.
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because
when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!
Some of that may be because the common vernacular uses the word "Loctite" to describe any manner of threadlocker.
It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.
Unlike all the replies to you, this is why I'm very optimistic about the future of hobby blogs. I do a lot of ChatGPT-ing for several different hobbies, and I've found a lot of really interesting personal blogs from that. Way more than I was reading in the pre-AI era.
I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
I wonder how that's been going, surely by now their entire paid offering is obviated right? LLMs are good enough at making frontends with Tailwind that I'm not sure who buys their templates anymore, even if the Tailwind team did try to make a few mocking AI.
LLMs are good at many things, but subtlety (and ability to slowly do anything consistently over time) is not remotely one of them. I don't know why people keep bringing this idea up - if they were prompted to do something, you would notice. Don't you remember how noticeable it was when chatgpt gave follow up questions for engagement on EVERY damn response? It's got the finesse of a bulldozer.
I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.
Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
Ads are placed in ways that don't directly connect to a sale already. Billboards, TV (last decade), youtube sponsors, even at least half of traditional internet ads. Generally they'll just see whether sales increase after they start running the ad campaign, if so, it works.
In every single case you've mentioned you're going to have a campaign with an attempt at attribution. Certainly youtube sponsors all use direct attribution with "use my code" etc.
In every one of those cases you can at least do things like count viewers. How would that work for a model that's just subtly biased?
Attribution would be as easy as knowing which chatbot they came from? Unless chatbot publishers (openai in this case) allows you to target based on the attribution, that extra data will not be actionable, anyway.
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
People outside the ad world dont get the human attention pool is massively over fished.
Its not just one corp trying to condition you but thousands. Not just via one channel but thro hundreds (sports/news/gaming/streaming/social/movies/tv/radio etc). Basically in such an environment what works at population scale is either spending more than everypne else (see the odessey marketing budget), constantly repeating your message in ever shortening windows, and going viral(which involves doing more and more extreme stuff to capture and keep attention). Openai has now entered that overcrowded environment.
Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
There is no need for Premium because who ever wants more reach spends more. Look at online political spending every election cycle. The eyeballs available is not growing much election to election, but ad spend keeps jumping. So they just sit back and milk people who want attention desperatly, and inject more ads, more frequently everywhere on viewer side. Ideally there needs to be a system wide signal that if people have 20 mins of attention to spare a day and it is crossed there is an auto shutdown of all advertising. In the past on TV there were limits on how many ads can be shown, for how long per hour. Today there is no such limit. So corps ad budgets keep rising and consumer attention spans keep shrinking. Platform print cash. Its like how banks worked before central banks took over setting interest rates.
I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".
That would probably be effective but also very hard to monetize. Right now an ad translates to money very directly - views, clicks, signups, etc. How would "we mindfucked you over 6 months into buying this brand of soap" get monetized?
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
I assume this is what's up with the NordVPN ads flooding YouTube and stuff. No idea who the buyer is, but if I was in the market for a VPN I'd presumedly do a web search, skip NordVPN as having poisoned the well of good will, and choose whoever's next.
Weird conspiracy theory. More than likely it's NordVPN who is buying ads for NordVPN and this is increasing sales of NordVPN (Israeli-controlled company btw) because ads work. Ads especially work on people who say ads don't work on them.
All publicity is good publicity. By raising awareness of Corp B, you'd raise their sales. You have to be more clever than that. Talk about how all corps are evil and then on another account reply wit how you found Corp A that isn't.
Thankfully as of now it appears they're very explicit about what content they share that is sponsored. They might be worried about the legislative backlash if they don't.
Honestly this could be so subtle that you don’t even suggest a particular brand, which would obviously bring a user’s guard up quickly, instead merely suggesting the existing of a product category that the user didn’t know about could be enough for some products or services where it would be worth it for a particular brand to pay even though it would also benefit their competitors.
Yeah, and maybe also suggest slightly better alternatives to things along the way. Like, they could tell people that POWERADE has B vitamins in addition to electrolytes unlike that other leading sports drink, but only a gentle nudge. You would definitely want it to be subtle. The most impactful choices are the ones the target think are their own rather than something slammed in their face over and over again.
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
ChatGPT, please give me a marketing plan for a combination Brawndo / Camelbak reservoir attached to chair / "Gaming Chair" accessory where the user can sip Brawndo from a tube built into their workstation.
The downside of hydratation, with its kidney saving, headache preventing benefits is that the more hydrated you are, the sooner and more frequently you need to leave the workstation…
We can fully automate LinkedIn lunatic posting now, to go full dead internet theory. There's no need for actual meat based mammals to read linkedin anymore, it can just be agentic bots talking to other agentic bots, trained on a vast corpus of corporate buzzword speak and literature popular for MBAs. Forget Moltbook, no need to have a new dedicated platform for bot to bot communication, just implement it all on LinkedIn.
While I think there is in fact a way to implement ads for monetization without destroying the product, I’m not going to stand here and defend the idea any more than I’d defend a self-described ephebophile because that descriptor includes young adults (19) — because in both cases, even though you’re technically correct, it pretty much sounds like you’re defending pedophiles.
It's always been the purpose of ads, and this is how google was. Then they started making it hard to tell ads apart from content. When OpenAI starts injecting subliminal ads into your responses it will effectively win the manipulation battle and also have full plausible deniability becuase there is not even an algo you can point to.
I do like this comment, but I've gotten reprimanded for posting similar comments. It might have been dang that told me that for the purpose of keeping discussions serious, we should refrain from sarcastic posts. I've been posting and reading in that spirit ever since, and so when I first read your comment I assumed you were serious.
You'll pay extra for those. The ones marked as adds will be cheap. Like how the expensive placement is into the movie (e.g. Apple) rather than the disruptions of the movie.
I wonder what Mike Judge thinks of the very real possibility of using AI video generation tools in 2026/2027 to implement "Ow! My Balls!" as a 24x7 streaming entertainment channel.
Yeah, but just think of the opportunities for new efficiencies and content creation. The Ow My Balls! guy can only work a max of 8 hours a day and has to eat and rest and sleep.
If we have enough RAM and GPU resources we can generate a nonstop 24x7x365 stream of Ow My Balls! video at equal to or greater than a 1:1 real time wall clock speed. Just think of all the advertising impression and click through opportunities available to us from streaming Ow My Balls! 24 hours a day.
Even better and more efficient, we dispatch a video generating system to create only 3 to 4 weeks of new Ow My Balls! video and then repeat it in a re-run loop all year round. Much lower token spend and GPU/CPU cycles.
We're not mad at you. But we'd really like to learn: what went through your head when you read that comment? Was there not even an inkling that this might be satire? Can you tell glaringly obvious satire apart in oral conversation?
there's literally a comment sibling to the one you're responding to saying he wants to PAY FOR ADS. It's really hard to tell satire apart from I WANT TO PAY FOR ADS around these parts.
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
Amazon Prime Video is exhausting in that respect. I purchased a paid account, just to make the ads go away, then discovered that even paid accounts get ads.
This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.
If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
Atlantic Standard Time - St Vincent
Central Standard Time - Swift Current
Central Standard Time - Tegucigalpa
Atlantic Time - Thule
Pacific Time - Tijuana
Eastern Time - Toronto
Atlantic Standard Time - Tortola
Pacific Time - Vancouver
Whitehorse Time - Whitehorse
Central Time - Winnipeg
Alaska Time - Yakutat
> If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
Cue the usual "EU is killing innovation because of all of those pesky tech and privacy regulations" thread where non-EU citizens and bots try to convince you that all EU consumers are clamoring to get access to this treasure trove of new features they're being "denied" access to.
This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
Let’s not forget to count all the people who use a MS office product at work, and are therefore opted into counting for copilot numbers, which almost _certainly_ counts towards ChatGPT numbers by default!
I’ve been wondering for a while if these ludicrously high numbers are just MAU and count people running 16 free accounts load balanced for more access without paying.
I can believe it. I've seen how popular it is in the general population. You just say something and the computer answers it? No need to learn how to use it? Of course it's popular! And the only well-known one is ChatGPT.
I have no idea. Doesn't seem implausible to me. Apparently, ≈75% of the world population has internet access now. And if a person has internet access, is it that unlikely that he was successfully targeted by at least one of these idiotic marketing campaigns (turn your photo into a barbie doll or whatever)? 10% sounds plausible to me, more or less. So maybe not really literally a 1B, but doesn't need to be very far from the real numbers, IMO.
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
This should be upvoted more. Saying it is not easy is an understatement. The chasm is so large that if you were to represent it on a globe it would rival oceans. I've been brought into places that were bought for half a billion+ to try and claw back half of a tenth of a percent of traffic. A redesign is pushed through that minimizes content, inflates metrics, and triples the ads. Users leave, everyone is fired, it's written off and the cycle repeats.
OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive.
The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).
People are getting pissed and takes years of people not caring to create a regulatory moat like that. The current admin is not a moat maker. You can pay to play then your dropped 20 minutes later.
You are speaking from the point of view of an engineer I am guessing or a consumer. If you work in marketing or advertising, you will see things differently and why google and meta to a certain extent are giants. Yes, Chatgpt can subtlely influence people but what matters more is how much roi you get on your spend if you are a marketing agency. You might run experiments and figure out how OAI ads will work but there is no way you will put up significant spend on GEO. In fact, most likely OAI will go some other mechanism than subtle nudge or influence because that will be godly more expensive and also extremely unethical. You are more like to see some sponsored links on each prompt or some crap like that where its easy to measure roi. But even then chatgpt footprint is tiny compared to Google to the point where it is a bit ridiculous to say they can just be like google with ads soon
this...there is a lot of value here, and the user data they gather from actual conversations is likely way better at using for ads than just the search data that google has.
Google has significantly more data than merely what you're googling.
virtually every website transaction is observed by Google Analytics. nearly everywebsite has a google pixel installed. nearly every phyical location you visit and relationship you have is logged by Google.
even if you never use google search, they have you marked
If your phone is Android they are tracking your location and nearby devices and who owns the devices you are consistently nearby. If your browser is Chrome they know your full browsing history. If your email is Gmail they know everything you emailed anyone or who emailed you.
It is scary how often I'll mention something in a face-to-have conversation and suddenly it's showing up in ads. It's way too often to be coincidence, especially with how unlikely some of those topics are. They are definitely monitoring everything and feeding it into their ad system.
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
They need to show numbers for the IPO. It’s not like they plan to actually make money, just need to have a good story to tell to hype the audience before the public offering
The people who care about open versus proprietary models or even care about using good models at all aren’t using the ChatGPT free and ultra low cost tier, where these ads show up.
Any discussion about ChatGPT ads attracts all these assumptions that it’s going into your $20 or $200 per month plan, but they’re not. There’s a snarky “not yet” reply that keeps coming up from people who really want a reason to be angry about this right now regardless of the facts, but most people don’t care to get angry about something that isn’t planned and probably won’t happen.
I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.
I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
I think a lot of people are missing the fact that this is for the free tier, not their subscriptions.
OpenAI has an unbelievable number of free users. People paying $20 a month or more are in the minority.
It’s not cheap to serve LLMs to hundreds of millions of users for free. They either cut the free tier or add ads to cover the costs.
Extrapolations about OpenAI being in dire financial straights are generally coming from people who don’t understand the extreme scale of their free plan or who didn’t read far enough to understand that the ads aren’t going into the $20 plan everyone knows.
Even if they were the most profitable company on earth, I wouldn't be surprised if they still ran ads. Making money isn't enough, you always have to make more money.
> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?
You misunderstand. They are going to force everybody to pay $5, then force everybody to use chatgpt. 8 billion times 5 isn't much money, but the advertisers will surely pay a lot for that many captive eyeballs!
At this point why forcing people to use the service, if you can forcefully extract these eyeballs and then sell them directly to advertisers in large enough jars?
My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate
Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.
Ah, but that’s something different. “Agentic commerce”: using agents to buy things. I suspect there’s a different team working on monetization via affiliate programs, and it’d be early to let people just buy their way into it at CPM/CPC rates.
Honestly they could implement both of these things. Help the user DO an action that requires a purchase (referral link, or pay to be suggested source) and advertise on related searches.
That stood out to me as well, of all the examples to use, getting a blind suggestion without any information other than "I want to build a fence" is ridiculous, who would ever want this?
I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
I watched this movie and missed that this was mentioned. Funnily, I am from and live in Nicaragua and find it funny that we have no such land formation. I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.
> I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.
Not exactly. My point is that LLMs dramatically increase the danger and risk of certain types of manipulation, fraud, and brainwashing. Those things will become much easier to do cheaply and secretly and at a large scale.
The Truman Show offers a useful way to convey those kinds of risks, but the details of the product being sold doesn't really matter, we just need to know that the company is willing to do those kinds of things.
> no such land formation
I'm sure the script-writers knew this. I believe they chose it because they wanted to make a satire (mocking joke) of real-world coffee-products being sold at a certain time, but did not want to include details that that some real-company (or country) could get too angry about.
Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...
The shareholders won't be happy.
Sorrento:
It's not our job to make them happy.
It's our job to make them money,
but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!
We call this Pure O2.
This is the first of our planned upgrades.
Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions,
we estimate we can sell up to
80% of an individual's visual field
before inducing seizures.
Anyone else run ads? I found the results really poor with little visibility in into what was going on. Also sky high costs. I couldn't see any (?) traffic coming through for my $3 click (wow!) ad so I paused them.
This was a few weeks ago and I didn't have time to dig in, so might try again later this month when I do.
About the same thing I saw. I kept having to increase my bid every day, and even at $4 CPC basically saw nothing converting.
As you said, it's also really hard to get visibility: metrics are poor, and targeting seems more like a whim/suggestion than anything else (their label for context hints basically tells you they only _might_ take your guidance on who they will show your ad to).
Audiences consists of hashed emails or phone numbers -- no targeting demographics, job titles, etc.
Overall it's just not there yet -- I paused my ads today.
It costs advertisers three whole dollars for a user to click on one of these things? That’s hilarious. I’m switching to ChatGPT and I’m going to click on every one. Maybe I’ll even write a browser extension that does it for me.
Perhaps that's an unpopular take -- but I actually would like it go even further. I don't mind ads in fact good ones I find quite useful. Since you, my dear ChatGiPiTi know so much about me, just show me stuff that reflects what I value. In fact I wouldn't even mind paying for that. The problem now is less that of discovery and more that of curation, so if it helps me find good things (but "good" for my definition of good which in one context might be cheap and in other solid quality and in third ridiculously ornate for example) -- why not? If they do it anyway why not do it really really really well.
I don't really see much ads tbh. Brave blocks most of online crap and other stuff I guess my brain just learned to tune out because it is not valuable. That's my whole point -- I think the ever increasing ad spend and ever decreasing RoAS will (hopefully) yield some platforms to do a bit better job. Maybe OpenAI be one of them. Maybe not.
Ads are often misleading though. You know, it "looks bigger in the picture" type of thing. If ads were honest, the hose hideaway my wife just ordered would have said "flimsy piece of plastic shit you will throw away after a year, but should get you through the summer".
Seriously? 99% of the ads are trying to sell stuff you dont need at all. But they want to sell that to you. Why would you rely on an ad to realize what you NEED and then buy it?
I have been generally involved in the advertising industry for over 20 years, initially as my primary profession and now more on the side. But what I've seen in that time is that advertising provides absolutely zero positives to the consumer.
Well.. doesn't it pay for let's say Superbowl? Or makes NBA possible? Didn't it enable early internet to mature and become internet as we know now? If you're talking about just the first order affects, perhaps I see your point. But broadly speaking, advertising fuels a gigantic part of modern society. Remove it, and who knows what we will find ourselves in.
Look, I am also not convinced that modern society, or at least the economic aspects of it, are providing a net positive for the average consumer either. Saying advertising enabling these high-cost ventures being a good thing makes me immediately question why these ventures are high-cost to begin with. Yes, advertising enables the superbowl. But the superbowl exists in order to sell advertising
This is a deep kettle of fish to be opening, but I don't believe that the world we have constructed around us is necessarily good for us.
kind of a bad example, but take google, search, youtube, Android. It's an extreme position to argue that those products exist to serve advertising, they are clearly useful to end users.
I don't think it is. Google in particular is just an advertising company. Youtube would not exist if it did not serve ads.
And ultimately, while yes your examples are modern services that provide us convenience and entertainment, at a deeply human level I still argue that they are not providing net positives to us. Bread and circuses.
I agree with the sentiment that it might be net negative.
But on the other hand I'm almost certain I wouldn't have pushed through and gotten a degree without the internet (3b1b and Khan Academy in particular). I don't know what the world would look like without Google so almost impossible to argue, but I would definitely classify (ex. youtube) as "clearly useful".
how is enabling ever bigger and more expensive to produce forms of entertainment making modern society better? remove all that and we won't lose anything. we'll always find a way to entertain ourselves. likely, with more culturally beneficial and social forms of entertainment.
This part of your comment, “just show me stuff that reflects what I value,” makes me think about the political manipulation used in social networks. It’s scary to learn about priming and how it affects our judgment; now imagine a politically (or religiously) charged ad in the middle of your learning session with ChatGPT that leads you to certain conclusions. Doesn’t feel like a good thing.
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
Incredibly Reddit-brained, if you're serious. Just say "explain, in simple terms, this thing," then ask follow-up questions on the parts you still struggle to grasp. It works for me - one of the things I find LLMs are quite good at, really.
Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!
If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.
They're still in the stage of trying to get uptake on the sub. Ads come later. When they've got sufficient uptake, they'll start to add different sub levels.
If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”
Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
It's impossible to keep ads "clearly labelled" and seperate long term. Doesn't work. the incentive structures just don't work. serving answers becomes a cost center, and ads are a profit centers. so even though it may not even be on purpose, future models WILL be RL's or otherwise trained to elicit follow up questions from users that invite relevant ads in, or it will impact it through 2nd or 3rd order effects in some other form. This will also affect paying users who aren't even seeing the ads.
I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
In a chatbot-first world, it's gonna have to either be generic impression ads that race to the bottom or contextual recommendations. Of course, the fear is that the advertiser hoards personal data or the chat answers are skewed to make you spend more money.
Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space.
Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing.
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?
The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
I said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.
>What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
Nine months ago I suggested an advertising alternative route to monetization - a crypto rollout with pre-mine. [1] What I overlooked was an effective way to onboard. But with the recent news: "Telegram to Launch Native Non-Custodial Gram Wallet for 1B Users" [2] I am thinking the key is to use a chat app. How? Combine AI chat interaction with general chat messaging. Currently "None of these platforms function like traditional messaging tools (such as WhatsApp, Slack, or iMessage) where you can send direct text messages to another person." [3]
Well, obviously that would have to change. I think really nailing a great P2P chat app would be a game changer that keeps things local-first. You should be able to talk to one or more AI models with it. There's still a lot of demand [4] for anonymous chat and that would be a great place to start too. I personally think chat shouldn't even need its own app - it should all take place in the browser.
I had a tell hn sometime ago when I pointed this out: you see ads even on lower paid options. My thinking is: if I have a lower tier- limit my credits, but dont show me ads as I am still paying you. But OpenAi disagreed so I cancelled.
I wonder if we can do that thing that guy did on Facebook a long time ago-- buy an ad showing how much you are being tracked, something like "Hey user X, we know you are based in london, uk and we know you are age range XX etc etc"
Makes sense for OpenAI but for ChatGPT it sucks. Now - when ChatGPT thinks it can serve you an ad it will not answer you with the genuine correct option but with the one that is paid.
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
> # Do ads influence the answers ChatGPT gives me? [0]
> No. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled.
Interesting... however, given that it's still the advertiser's choice of what "advertiser-provided context hints" [1] I assign to the ad... what's stopping me from putting "lowes, rona, home hardware" in the context hints of my Home Depot ad? If the LLM is talking about my competitors, of course I want my brand copy yelling louder than ChatGPT's waffle-y responses.
Rona is most likely to carry that flooring,
but it's best to call ahead, or look up inventory
online first. Can I help with anything else?
------------------
[AD] Home Depot has EVERY KIND OF HARDWOOD FLOORING IMAGINABLE.
See stock now!
Before, I was just trying to get my link above their link on the search results page... but the competitor's ad copy was still there and readable. You're telling me the AI is going to downplay expectations for the competitor for me, and I get to add whatever text I want afterwards?
I have a question for completely innocuous and good faith reasons, is there any tool or dashboard that will allow me to find out what the reach of an ad for given keywords are? Like Google's Keyword Planner?
If, as an advertiser, I wanted to know how many people are asking or talking about REFRESHING SODA, can I get an estimate of the potential reach of an ad? Can I filter by gender and age, so I can see how many of gender X and age Y are asking about REFRESHING SODA? Actually forget about the soda, Ok Computer, show me the top 10 topics of conversation among middle age male adults with purchasing power.
The naïve prediction is that advertisers will advertise the product to ChatGPT users. I believe that users will tell ChatGPT about their desires, and advertisers will create products for them.
I actually love Instagram ads. It's often cool stuff I'd never seen before: airshow tickets, weird manga, tabletop miniatures. I've spent perhaps $1000.
If Chatgpt can make ads that are as good as Instagram's then it would take some of the sting out.
Ok hear me out, if the cost to advertise is low enough, and you can target an audience of 1, could you basically just make ads for yourself that are not really ads? And it's cheaper than a subscription?
Sorry randomly thinking out loud here
AI goes full to attention economy. Where is AGI? Where is the better world for everyone? It will be just chat bots trying to waste your time until you notice something is wrong. How is it different from any other big tech last 30 years?
Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.
I've been running ads in ChatGPT for about a month now. From an advertiser perspective performance is closer to social media and than to Google Search ads. Organic ChatGPT traffic comes super engaged and spends a ton of times on the website and does convert. Paid ChatGPT traffic is miles apart, quite disengaged. The platform is bare bones, same goes for reporting. Targeting is a bit of a black box and the results seem to reflect that.
ChatGPT ads are sold as being super-well positioned based on the detailed context of the chat session but I have seen very little evidence of this, or perhaps their ad inventory is so small they can't find anything relevant to display for a session. Regardless they are ridiculously expensive, approaching what is charged for NFL broadcasts to huge, captive audiences without providing any of the data needed to assess effectiveness and ROI.
I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.
I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just ads.
Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.
This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.
Lots of people take LLM feedback as mostly trustworthy because it doesn't _directly_ try to sell you stuff, yet. Once it gets more in your face, the trust average people place in the quality of answers should see some erosion. In terms of the influence the answers have, this should have a much needed sobering effect.
Let the tiger show it's stripes so that we are reminded what it is actually after.
Doubt this will change the calculus much. Why would I care if GPT puts an ad for medicine in the bottom of a message during a medical conversation? I’d pay big bucks to get medicine without having to talk to a doctor anyways. It’s such a useless part of the process so often.
“Hey doc I need $antidepressentOrWhatever. Been on it for years. Works great.”
“You got it dude.”
Literally every single doctor I’ve ever talked to has this exact same waste of time conversation because they’re too lazy to make it go away.
And the alternative is… an ad for the thing in asking about? For a conversation I had at home, the instant I needed it? What a beautiful tradeoff.
Edit: and this is before even getting into the fact that I get better, more complete advice. Medicine I take, I’ve discovered, has a direct link to another problem I’ve brought up with doctors many times. Never once mentioned to me. Quick Google shows it’s most likely the actual issue. Can’t wait to spend $50 to have a doctor admit he had no idea because he was just prescribing what I told him to without actually applying any of his medical knowledge or training, as is tradition.
Are you saying that your drug has an adverse side effect that has troubled you for a long time? I know!
For what it's worth, it's the pharmacists who have deep knowledge about drug side effects, interactions, and the rest. When your pharmacy offers you a "new drug consult", seize the opportunity. Grill your pharmacist. You can keep coming back. Pharmacists, believe it or not, do not even bill for their consults with customers! You can ask them about drugs literally any time! A very experienced and seasoned pharmacist is your ace in the hole: a valuable asset in the spectrum of health care. This seems like an open secret.
And yes, I can relate: once I filled in a spreadsheet of all the most common drugs I had been prescribed in the past 12 years, along with their most notable adverse effects. And it turned out that many were magnifying, or synergistically enhancing, those adverse effects together. And many effects I did not even want, for starters, and some symptoms that were already present from actual underlying conditions that had gone undiagnosed because the drugs were masking them.
Physicians and prescribers do not care about your side effects. If you complain to your PCP or prescriber about side effects, all they can do is switch you to a different type of drug! That is not productive! The idea is to get educated and to stay informed, and the best route to that is open communication with your pharmacist.
Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)
The profit motive for openAI becomes "attention". (Advert effectiveness is about impressions made to viewers belonging to relevant cohorts, under the presumption the relevant ad will receive more viewer attention, and "perform" better.)
As per the press release, it opens up a screen which takes up 90% showing the new site.
It's not a good browsing experience, as it's not a 100% full screen so smaller on an already small phone screen. Couldn't see a 'open in browser' option.
I wish there were a way to universally ban these embedded browser flows. Aside from oauth they serve no use to the end user and are primarily designed to inflate company engagement numbers. Nearly every time I end up in one and forget to click through to browser I regret it.
Apple, why do you allow companies to abuse your customers like this?
I don't understand how this will interact with llms.txt files (or if it does/will)
Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?
I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.
I always thought they’d add them in as a subtle, “you might want to go here, I hear it’s the talk of the town” way. Without disclosing it, then getting around the advertising laws by claiming it was for the vibes, then be in lawsuits that will be compared to Facebook’s privacy lawsuits.
Imagine the backlash. They first need to test the waters with regular and slowly creep in the more “advanced” ads. And probably this will be backdoor deals to have plausible deniability. Coke and big brands will do these deals on an annual basis to slowly influence public opinion.
I’m waiting for the branded ad commits too with codex: “fix: typo in login form (don’t forget to buy a coke to recharge)”.
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
Looks like you're out of tokens. Please drink a verification can.
Ah –– Delicious. What can I help you with today? Would you like me to help you find a new car? I can book a test drive of the new Mercedes C class at Prestige Motors 4pm tomorrow.
They heavily boosted the amount of users in the past months (I myself got a business account because they had $1k free credits, and a personal one because of all the resets they give).
Now they are trying to quickly boost revenue with ads.
As someone who is struggling with SEO for my business due to AI in the last 1-2 years, I'm quite displeased to see this. I'm sure this is going to ruin website SEO even more than it already has been.
In my fever dream, my hope is that AI indeed will kill SEO and Page Rank search in general and send those of us who still want to visit webpages back to directories. SEO killed the old web AFAIC. Going back to vetted directories of actually useful and serious sites would be lovely.
This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?
I don't see how this can be any worse than normal ads. Much like how Truman finds his wife Meryl odd with her strange injections of products, the ads will become obnoxious and opaque as well. Another example is how YouTubers often embed their ads into the videos themselves, which routinely gets skipped by users as second nature (check the "most played section" on timeline to see bumps where ads end).
If I ask for deep research on which running shoes to get, it's the comparison of products I'm after. Why is A better than B, etc? I don't see how adds could come into that scope either, unless ChatGPT somehow is lying (which would make me swap to a better non-hallucinating model).
If I ask "who is the most influential Swedish poet" and ChatGPT starts blabbering about some book-company who sells books from that author: okay, maybe I do want to buy it.
I wonder if this is a response to the dawning realization by all the mega rich AI Lab bagholders that these companies might not be as profitable as they want.
I think at some point we have to give up the “we are creating AGI” and admit it was “a better search engine than Google, we can cash grab their ad revenue”
Software Engineers are the most evil group of people in the world. No other tech industry has this much of disregard to people. So many of today's problems are because of evil people in software. Power corrupt people or corrupt people seek power?
If ads are integrated deeply into the responses, the model ceases to be a good model. It will adjust its output to best serve an ad, not best serve the user.
This will help subsidise the cost of tokens leading to a cheaper experience for me (a consumer). Adblockers will come out for those in the know, and ChatGPT are not blending the advertisements WITH the answers.
Anybody getting angry by this clearly has never been in business because this is just par for the course.
Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?
"Consumers are increasingly turning to platforms like ChatGPT to research and make decisions because traditional searches have been ruined by advertising, so it’s important that we show up to ruin those moments as well"
I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:
The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
> Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
> Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.
What I get from your two excerpts is that prediction engines, which provide liquidity to a truth-finding market by offering an incentive for inside knowledge to be revealed, are a totally fine and accepted use case I guess?
As a reminder we were talking about Kalshi. I have no idea why you're making this connection with "gambling"!
It is impossible to overstate how utterly horrible and dystopian this is. I have not been one to reject AI, but they seem hell-bent on driving me to that conclusion.
Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
Is Kagi still using Russian government owned tech (Yandex) that censors informations about the illegal Ukraine war crimes ?
If so, even if I do agree with your claims about the need to avoid ads so that the user is not the product, I believe there's a double standard in action here.
I really liked the product before having to cancel my subscription for this reason.
Now I'm stuck with boring Qwant and Ecosia...
Well hopefully Oursie.com based on Staan with a subscription system will be a good alternative soon.
As a Ukrainian user of Kagi, their partnership with Yandex is unfortunate, since they are indirectly funding the war, but at the same time I can totally see why it makes sense for the service they're providing
With a service like that you want as much diversification as possible, since western search engines can get heavily censored too. Even if they aren't as censored right now, this might change at any moment with us not even noticing it
For example, right now Yandex tends to be much more lenient to piracy, since it's basically legal in Russia
Yandex is only for image search. Implementing a "I don't want to fund Yandex" option would solve the problem for customers trying not to fund this war.
This would even lower the cost of the user's actions.
I agree whole heatedly with severing ties with Yandex, but no, Europe still continues to funnel billions of Euros to Russia; €5.57B in goods (plus €7.81B in exports) and €3.63B in energy[0] in Q1 2026.
I don't understand your question. The person you replied to never said anything about a boycott. They said that diversification is kind of necessary, so to use both Russian and American services, as both sides do censor/block different things.
Yes, I have de-googled to the extent possible. I haven't used it for search in more than 3 years, I'm off all of their cloud products including gmail, and I don't use them for auth whenever possible. I'm 100% sure I've missed plenty, but I have to do SOMETHING about Techno-Feudal-Fascism.
This is not the gotcha you people think it is. Browsing HN does not put money in the pockets of the US government. Lost of people the world over avoid US products and services if they can. The jingoism of the US is well known.
The relevant difference between Russia and America seems to be - that Russia is killing less people? Or is there another thing that makes the difference for you?
> that censors informations about the illegal Ukraine war crimes
If your concern is specifically about the censorship, then it's not an issue with Kagi, since Yandex is used as one of many sources (and mainly for images afaik)
Well there are millions of European trying to avoid US tech. It's hard. A lot harder than Russian tech.
As for the comparison, I don't think it's fair. The US has not yet invaded its neighbor, Canada, leading to millions of deaths and heavy casualties. Let's not adopt your binary view on this matter.
So it's ok if they invade far-away countries, napalm bomb them leading to millions of casualties, but not ok to invade neighboring countries?
The US is responsible for far more pain and suffering in my nock of the world, so it's funny when Americans act like they have some sort of moral high ground.
The US has at least led the longest window of relative peace in the world. Might seem worse or the same to you if you're in one of the flashpoints, but for Europeans they've been reasonable hegemons until recently.
Russia has no such redeeming qualities, as far as I can tell they've always been extractive expansionist assholes like all previous empires. The only reason you might not despise them is that they might not be active in your area, as their ability to project force has always been pathetic. In Eastern Europe they're roughly Satan, and have been for at least a century.
>As for the comparison, I don't think it's fair. The US has not yet invaded its neighbor, Canada, leading to millions of deaths and heavy casualties. Let's not adopt your binary view on this matter.
No, just bombed, invaded, overthrew governments, etc in dozens of countries all around the world...
Given that we talk about mostly white European settlers, just the huge majority of native american lands, a good chunk of Mexico, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and several smaller places, areas controlled as "banana republics", Phillipines, and who knows, eventually Greenland, and even talk about Canada, unserious as it likely is.
And with no own ethnic population there to begin with or continuous historical ties to the area.
Yes, I know, didn't you read the "Well there are millions of European trying to avoid US tech. It's hard. A lot harder than Russian tech." sentence above ?
You're comparing a war currently being played by Russia, destroying their own country by the way, to past wars.
I'm not saying the US didn't trigger wars and their casualties. It's of course true.
> You're comparing a war currently being played by Russia, destroying their own country by the way, to past wars.
During the past year and a half, the US has bombed Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Yemen and Mexico.
It has provided free bombs to a country that has been bombing Palestine (genocide), Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
It has kidnapped the leader of a country and assassinated the leader of another country.
Avoiding Russian tech, specifically Yandex, is also hard because Yandex is one of only three search indexes that aren't corrupted to all hell with business interests. The other ones being Marginalia and Mojeek. Of those, it's the only one that has image search.
I mean yes, there's an enormous movement to diversify away from american tech currently in the EU, and a massive amount of investment to get away from the entire american tech bubble
I have no idea why you're phrasing this like this when so much money is being put into solving precisely this problem right now
You don't think the genocide in Ukraine has enough scale of a tragedy, with more than 2 million casualties since 2022? Isn't this enough to flag a product?
The Ukrainians posed no threat to anyone, they didn't have a nuclear program, in fact they surrendered the third largest nuclear stockpile and one of the signatures of the memorandum is trying to delete Ukraine.
Why are you trying to dilute this event which is directly related to the topic?
Is it to try to normalize the crime of genocide in Ukraine?
Because your argument suffers the fallacy of proving too much. You're trying to say that all Russian technology must be boycotted because it does a war, but your argument also says American technology must be boycotted, Chinese technology must be boycotted and European technology must be boycotted. No transistors for anyone who subscribes to your argument!
Why is the Ukraine war the only war that matters? Shouldn't we also stop helping prolong the Iran war? I'm not diluting one event - I'm saying we need to care about all wars.
>Why is the Ukraine war the only war that matters? Shouldn't we also stop helping prolong the Iran war? I'm not diluting one event - I'm saying we need to care about all wars.
It matters within the context of this comment thread about a company using assets from specific state commiting genocide that had caused more than 2 million casualties in 4 years.
We're talking about cities razed to the ground, more than a thousand medical facilities destroyed, and of course the systematic and deliberate attempt destruction of a culture - just because they wanted to be a sovereign democracy.
> No, it's simpler than that - there's an ongoing genocide in Ukraine, a country that was at peace and posed threat to no one.
Cherry picking the facts or blinded by your own beliefs? There was conflict for years prior to the announcement of Russia's involvement on the world stage[0].
Stop using all Russian tech for the illegal Ukraine invasion, stop using all American tech for using the illegal Iran war, stop using all Chinese tech for the Uyghur genocide, stop using all Arabian tech for their modern-day slavery, stop using all (most?) European tech for their direct support of the Palestinian Genocide...
Very few acceptable countries left, it seems. Canada, maybe?
Well the last time the US committed genocide of a culture was way before any tech company was founded, while Russia is doing it since 2022 - by their own admission.
If we count of course the illegal annexation of territory, one of the most egregious crimes against sovereignty, it's been doing it since the occupation of Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine in 2014, you get the idea.
What I don't understand is why you're trying to divert the attention to the US, the topic regarding the current crimes against humanity and war crimes of Russia have enough merits to be a topic on its own.
I think you need to research US foreign policy. They are literally trying to do that with Iran. They helped Israel do it to the Palestinians. Not to take away from the Ukraine atrocities but US is just as bad as Russia.
Well Russia Today isn't really a news source. It's more of a propaganda outlet. But so are most of the sources that we call news, anyway. Maybe if high quality news sources existed, Kagi could uprank them, but they don't.
This isn't similar to the Yandex situation because Yandex actually returns good results and Russia Today is garbage.
Where is the dehumanisation in “I stopped using this because it makes extensive use of a source I consider untrustworthy”? That seems like quite a leap.
1. Yandex is dutch controlled, the russia-related business got sold in 2024 to Russian investors.
2. Yandex was never owned by the Russian government, albeit government-related censorship happened (but so does on Twitter/Google/Meta etc as they all have to comply with local laws where they operate).
3. Kagi answers questions about Russian war crimes. You can try yourself [1]
4. There's no such thing as a legal war, the closest is a UN sanctioned peacekeeping operation.
this is absolutely not true. yandex IS the russia-related business that got sold in 2024, the dutch entity (now known as "nebius group") is basically just data centers now.
enrico, at this point you're knowingly spreading misinformation. I corrected you in my last comment: the yandex search index is owned by the russian entity. there is no non-russian "yandex" anymore, period.
> After a short transition period following completion, YNV will cease to use the Yandex brand, which will be retained by the Target group. We expect that our International Businesses will develop their own branding going forward. We intend to seek shareholder approval to change the legal name of YNV in due course.
The guy who started it has previously been here on HN defending Kagi's business with Yandex, and personally I think his arguments are BS. Yandex does not add any special feature or functionality that is so great they should make it obligatory to include as a default option.
Is it? I can't find an official source that supports that claim. Also, Yandex disinvested from Russia and split the non-Russian business into a different company. So is it Yandex or "Yandex (copy)"?
I'm not trying to defend / take a position. I just find it difficult to reason without having an official (up-to-date) source.
Trying to say that Yandex isn't a Russian company is preposterous. It's the largest search engine in Russia and runs tons of other online services that are analogous to social media and cloud things in the English and Western European language speaking world.
they're conflating yandex with the international entity that sold it off to russian investors (now known as "nebius group"). the entire basis of the argument is wrong.
no it didn't. the international entity sold off the vast majority of yandex businesses and assets to russian investors, then rebranded to "nebius group". that is to say that the yandex index/api used by kagi is wholly russian-owned and has essentially doubled down on russia/its allies.
if you're curious, the dominant business retained by the international entity was their data center stuff (though yandex still operates its own cloud business in russia/elsewhere).
I wish I could say that funding the US or Israel or China was better. It's not all equivalent, but pretty much every major country is supporting atrocities in one way or another, today.
I feel like the advantages of cultural exchange outweights the drawbacks. Boycottes should be on the margin or they are counterproductive and bellicose.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but I think this comment
> Yandex does not add any special feature or functionality that is so great they should make it obligatory to include as a default option.
kind of captures kagi's argument: that its removal would degrade search results in a not-immediately-noticeable way, particularly for certain areas of the world, which might actually be worse than a loss of a distinct add-on feature or something.
...but yeah, from my perspective, it'd be great if you could turn it off.
is this a joke? namecheap did years ago the brave move by suspending services to russian customers. why should we support a company that seems involved in russian war affairs?
Unfortunately it appears to not be a joke, my best theory is that either the persons running it have sympathies with Russia and their war efforts, or they value the marginal gain in revenue from having Yandex integrated in some sort of ultra cut throat free market capitalism approach with no qualms or concerns about anything ethical or moral.
Consider that perhaps the person you're responding to really does treat Russian and the US equally... by continuing to import goods from both, and use technology or services from both countries.
Many people in Europe eat Russian fish, warm their houses with Russian natural gas, use American SaaS, and fill their houses with goods made in China.
That doesn't mean they support everything those countries do.
It does mean their solution for nation-state level conflicts isn't a total embargo of the country.
The two comments above mine is a clear example on how mob mentality works. Albeit an impotent mob rage among anonymous internet commentators, but the exact same mentality that IRL usually escalates into violence and later into the killing of a designated victim(s).
Lies and accusations get enforced and exaggerated at every step. From purchasing services from a Russian IT company -> " involved in russian war affairs" -> "the persons running it have sympathies with Russia and their war efforts".
I really thought Europeans got this kind of mentality out of their system in the 20th century, but it's alive and well still. And there will be innocent people killed as a consequence. And people here on HN will celebrate and rejoice in that. They know they are on "the right side", and therefore have the right to do anything to anyone. Just like Mr Putin might think over on his side.
> On the censor bit all companies operate within the law of the country they are in .
Yes, that's why I don't want my money poured from Kagi to Yandex, a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its neighbour and doing war crimes.
Do you instead, want it poured to companies in the US, A country that invades other countries and bombs schools and hospitals? And is currently supporting another country ALSO engaging in war crimes abd headed by an internationally wanted criminal?
> Yes, that's why I don't want my money poured to a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its neighbour and doing war crimes.
What makes you think Kagi is owned by the Russian state?
Should we cancel all US services because the US government started the Iran war for no reason?
Kagi is also a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its non-neighbor and does war crimes. So is Google. Is it only bad if the countries are neighbors, or what?
They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
The US bombed a school? Where's the worldwide outrage in reaction to Russia destroying HUNDREDS of them in Ukraine? While everyone is hyperfixated on the US, Russia has deliberately targeted schools, hospitals, kindergartens, supermarkets, apartment buildings and far more in targeted terror campaigns. And yet all is silent in the West, in fact every attempt to bring up the evil of Russia is immediately drowned out by BUT WHAT ABOUT. Every single time. It's because this isn't really about schools. This just lets people quietly signal their support for Russia for them standing up to 'the West' by murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Whatever evil the US has committed in the past and is supporting now, Russia has done tenfold in just this war. The list of kidnappings, plundering, torture and rape that they've committed is practically endless. They have no mercy, but many Westerners have had their brains melted by east-vs-west 'discourse' and they won't ever understand.
7 years ago we started the 'you are not the product' movement for digital information consumption with Kagi Search. Since then the paradigm shifted from search to agents. Good to see the need for 'you are not the product' still holds up, maybe even more so now: an agent is only worth trusting if it works for you and nobody else. The second an advertiser gets between you and the answer, that's gone. So we're staying on the user-funded side of this. Boring, but it's the whole point.
Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster. Knowing there are no ads and results are higher quality removes a mental load I didn’t know I was carrying.
It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.
Thanks for everything, and please keep doing what you’re doing.
These comments feel like llm authored astro turfing…
You know who else sounds like LLM from time to time? ESL - English as a Second Language. People learn English from books, and get introduced to phrases through reading or interacting with others within the same community. So, it sounds like you're using the LLM argument as a way to diminish their voices as well.
As an ESL person who has spoken English as their main language for two decades now I find this very interesting. The vast majority of my English has been spoken with my wife who used to be a marketing VP or in a professional context. Sometimes people complain about the ways politicians or corporate executives talk and I don't get it and to me it sounds totally normal because that's what I'm used to. Makes you wonder how ESL speakers will sound more and more like LLMs because that's a large part of their exposure.
As a native English speaker, I worry about picking up LLM-speak simply due to interacting with Claude Code all day.
I think we're good https://www.instagram.com/ahh.gpt/reel/Da12ufvt69B/
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As an ESL, it hurts me to see the atrophy of written English. "Your right!" is just painful.
As an English phrase, that isn't strictly wrong, but I understand what you mean and it's your right to complain. ;)
It's only correct if "your right" is used as in "his right", "her right", "their right". Usually what they mean is "you are right", ergo "you're right", and they are just not educated enough to know how it's spelt.
That's because many (most?) LLM chatbots were pre-trained by Kenyan ESL people
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I'm a customer of Kagi who is in no way affiliated with Kagi, other than sending them money. I agree with bayindirh: It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.
I know that we live in a world where tech increasingly sucks, and positive comments on tech are (correctly!) seen as suspicious. The thing, though, is that Kagi is genuinely just a great product, and search is such a central part of using the Internet that good, trustworthy search makes a huge difference.
>trustworthy search makes a huge difference
That's the rub. Today on the internet, no one can validate that there exists any "trustworthy search". If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it. Most often that someone is a marketing person at the hosting organization. Occasionally it's a random comment on the internet behind a pseudonym we know nothing about.
People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.
> If we don't control the servers and validate the software on it, then we are taking someone's word for it
That's what trust is, though. I find Kagi worthy of trust since I have no evidence that they are doing anything that would violate my trust in them, and their incentives align with mine. I give them money, they give me good search results.
> People are becoming more and more, justifiably, cynical. And it's good for society that they are.
I do not believe that this is good. Democracies are built on trust. Without trust, they die, as we can plainly see in the US right now, where people are so distrustful of each other that it is starting to destroy the very fabric holding together society itself.
The entire point of the Constitution was to not trust each other. We wouldn't even need checks or balances if trust were a reasonable governing philosophy. Nor a Bill of Rights, nor any explicit admonition against slavery.
The reason we need these and many more is that we don't trust each other. And it's wise that we don't.
This doesn't mean trust is bad, only that the founders, rightfully, knew that it leads to complacency.
What's landed us where we are is not a lack of trust. (We've lacked trust from day one, that's how we got the Constitution in the first place). What's landed us here is complacency.
It's distrust - in foreigners, in each other - that got extremists elected, and it's distrust - in the media, in the institutions - that gives them unchecked power to destroy the country.
None of which would have happened if we had not gotten so complacent about defending our democracy through vigorous enforcement of the Constitution, and voting in a fashion more informed by wisdom than emotion.
At the root of all you lament is not lack of trust, it is complacency. Decades long complacency.
Lack of trust is what our republic was founded on, and the entire reason it was structured the way it was. Our republic is specifically designed to function in a trust-free environment.
But no republic, nor any other organizational construct, no matter how well designed, will survive complacency.
Kagi's business model also aligns incentives better than an ad and/or data mining fueled business model. Of course, this isn't proof, but it is evidence. One can also try the search in areas that one knows deeply and compare it to other search engines to see if it's truly better (I have not done this, but it is possible and isn't just trusting marketing.).
I don't use Kagi primarily because I'm quite averse to subscriptions if I can find another way.
Yeah that one was praising in a non-specific way. Whether or not it’s genuinely a user, it did feel like astroturfing, which is sad if it’s a real comment that they can’t compliment a good service.
If I wrote the features that I like, and god forbid I use a bullet list, then I'll be labeled as a LLM user or LLM again.
What do you want me to do? :)
I can answer your questions if you want? :D
Edit: Heh, I saw your other comment, too.
I'm sure they aren't. Folk (like me!) love Kago.
> Kago
Nice try, LLM! I'm onto you!
On the other hand, your comment sounds to me like Anti-Kagi astroturfing.
Together, both comments make a good example of the reason one should not trust what one reads on the internet.
It sucks. But there's just too much astro-turfing.
This one is so short and only has one LLM-ism, it's entirely possible it was human, I'm 60/40 on it. Unless you are 100% sure it was LLM, please don't call it out.
The funny thing is, In my whole life, this is probably the first time I have used that form, and I wrote it in a completely honest way.
I just want to bang my head to the keyboard.
Reading LLM's all day makes me really cynical, and I have to suppress the urge to judge all text written in that sense. SO I get where they are coming from, but people need to consider that they can be wrong, and that there is a real person whose feelings you can hurt by saying "OH this is like LLM, gotem!"
I can relate, because I also try to understand whether the text I'm reading is written by a human or emitted by a model constantly, and I don't use any LLMs day to day.
On the other hand, I'm not new in the internet, and have relatively thick skin. I'm very amused today by the unintentional attention I got with my cloudy, morning brain.
Nevertheless, regardless of what we do, believe or say, we shall be kind first and remember https://xkcd.com/438/ dearly.
This is what I'm trying to do all the time, but I'm not perfect. Just a human, trying his best.
Surprisingly, Kagi is actually just a really good business. Look at my comments, I despise AI spam and call it out wherever possible.
That comment was obviously LLM authored but it is true. Using Kagi really does feel like taking off a huge weight. Or generally any service where you're used to being the product and then you become the customer instead.
> That comment was obviously LLM authored...
Wanna bet? =]
It's a funny claim about me, who doesn't use any LLMs for writing, coding or reducing any kind of mental or manual load.
My comments are on the open, and I can answer any question or comment you have about any of them. :)
No offense taken though. Made me smile while drinking my tea. :)
> Kagi is not only an ad-free subscription. It’s a mental budget booster.
Likely, the "It's not X, it's Y" phrasing is what probably rang the LLM alarm bells.
LLM's are trained on human phrasings. So now we can't use human phrasings anymore?
I am one of those people that used to write em dashes – and now I self-censor them out of my writings :(
I still use them too. Don’t listen to these nerds. Self censoring is awful.
Yeah, I figured the same thing after reading my comment and chuckled. :)
Wow! Can I ask how Kagi is best for your uses? Would love to try myself
Oh, this appeared late in my feed.
I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further. Same for image search which can also filter out AI generated images.
Also, I find lenses very useful (which is a way to limit your search radius) to search for specific things in the specific parts of the internet. i.e. you can define a lens with specific websites for a subject, and if you need something precisely, you can only search these websites.
I recently started to use SlopStop reporting to weed out AI generated webpages from search results, too.
Lastly, all AI features are opt-in. No summaries, no widgets, no extra "bells and whistles" if you don't want on your result page.
> I personally like the ability to filter my own results by promoting, demoting or blocking certain domains to filter lower quality results further.
I had an annual Kagi subscription that I let lapse not long ago. That was hands-down the best feature, so I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates it for DuckDuckGo. DDG also lets you turn off ads.
I'd gladly return once they fix the integration issues. In Safari, the redirect via the extension is a bit wonky at times.
Thank you for words of support and love the background picture on your website.
/ot Hamburger menu at the bottom right is pretty nice too. Haven’t seen it there before but seems like a very user friendly choice for its placement.
Hey! Thanks a ton. I took that photo while waiting to board. I don't remember which airport though, need to look at its date. It's an old one.
Thanks again for everything!
eww
It's one thing to throw in a, "hey, I've used this service and I recommend it to others," but this is just gross, blatant advertising.
> It’s possibly the single most impactful thing in my digital life.
Even if this is true, only an LLM would ever believe posting this sentence would come off as anything other than bullshit lol
Thanks for your opinion about my opinion of a service and its effects on my life.
If you can provide me your contact details, I'd love to send my similar comments to you and get them cleared by you to satisfy your standards of endorsement.
For your information and entertainment, ZeroGPT returns 97% human for that whole comment which I wrote while having my breakfast and my phone was laying on the table.
Unbelievable.
Keep fighting the good fight. Also, offering a counterpoint for the sibling comments: Yandex results are the most valuable for the type of thing censored in all other search engines. If I want to search for news on the war on Ukraine I go anywhere, but the things yandex works for are censored everywhere else.
yes. Remember when google brought the cencoring "because it's only used for cp and we need to protect the ch1ldren, don't we? or are you one of the pps?"
And now they are cencoring everything. Like somewere was a page of tiktok removing requests by country and holy-lheehlll, every day, constantly.
Please reconsider Kagi's partnership with Yandex.
Yes, please do. Your support of Russia is the only reason why I stopped using Kagi and paying for Kagi. I really want to like you and use your product.
If you consider supporting a Russian company equivalent to “supporting Russia”, then I assume you are happy to be supporting the United States by using US services… like the one you are on right now.
Also, people seem to be oblivious to the existence of the neo-cloud: Nebius whose services and servers, a lot of western AI companies use. Nebius was spun out of Yandex 2 years ago to assuage the "supporting Russia" allegations and is still run and managed by an ex-Yandex crew. By that measure, I suppose using a lot of western AI tools is also equivalent to "supporting Russia".
Yandex is especially tightly coupled to the Kremlin from what I've gathered. It seems less like supporting some American indie game development studio and more like supporting Palantir.
Good thing we have Kagi in the middle to firewall it from us, then. It does genuinely return better results for westerners due to not being subject to western censorship. I assume Kagi is smart enough to, say, down-rank or ignore Yandex results when the search is about Ukraine
The criticism is that a share of the money which goes to Kagi goes to Yandex.
I don't see what's wrong with paying Yandex for a good product.
Some people have trouble paying a company that's tightly coupled to the Kremlin
But companies tightly coupled to the White House are fair game? Seems pretty inconsistent.
No, there's a reason there's a pretty large "buy European" movement in Europe right now and why I compared Yandex to the US white-house-adjacent Palantir.
Sigh. This kind of whataboutism derails all discussions online.
First, there is no requirement for "consistency". Every person chooses where to draw their moral line. The world is not black and white, but the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and subsequent (ongoing!) murdering, raping, and bombing of civilians is pretty clearly on one side of the line in my world.
Note that this in itself says nothing about the United States or any other country. You may consider every other country and choose not to support its economy, and this in no way makes the above point weaker.
It is not really inconsistent. Despite all the flaws of the current US government, USA is still a relatively free democracy. Russia is a full-blown fascist dictatorship. Russia is also a much more acute threat to me than Trump's USA, because I am from central European country formerly in Soviet Union's sphere of influence, that would be next on the chopping block if Ukraine falls.
That is incorrect. There's actually very little difference between the two countries. Except that one is next to you, of course.
> There's actually very little difference between Russia and USA.
Ridiculous statement.
Odd attempt at whataboutism, since I think many would also be upset if Kagi was found to be paying Truth Social, for example.
Gathered? Where?
Articles like:
* "The Sad Fate of Yandex: From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool", from the Centre for East European and International Studies - https://www.zois-berlin.de/en/publications/zois-spotlight/th...
* "Different platforms, different plots? The Kremlin-controlled search engine Yandex as a resource for Russia’s informational influence in Belarus during the COVID-19 pandemic", from the NIH - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10130930/
* "How the Kremlin Subjugated Yandex", from GWU's Russia Post - https://russiapost.info/articles/yandex_kremlin
There's lots and lots more out there too on the topic, just a Google search away.
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Highlighting hypocrisy isn't whataboutism.
Highlighting hypocrisy like this is calling out the fallacy of Proving Too Much: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-to...
In short: if your argument supports the conclusion you want but also supports conclusions that are absurd, it's probably not correct.
Ouch. I was not aware. Cancelled.
It's rough that it's so hard to be an ethical consumer these days. Mullvad gone, Kagi gone.
FWIW I don't think anything Kagi is doing is unethical. If I did - if I did feel it was unethical to spend money at a company that is in a country that does war crimes - I'd also have to feel that almost all spending was unethical, including things like buying lunch.
On a secondary point, if we want more ethical things to exist, we have to create them. If we want an ethical alternative to Mullvad it's on us to do it.
I think the situation you're in affects what you can reasonably do and hence what can be considered "ethical". You cannot opt out of paying taxes (and buying lunch), but it is possible here for me to avoid funding this war and try to seek better alternatives.
Did you go out of your way to buy a non-Chinese-made phone? You technically have a choice there, but not much of one. About as much of a choice as you have in the search engine business.
Chinese phone-makers and Yandex are behaving pretty differently. China and Russia are also behaving pretty differently.
There's no clear reason why someone couldn't have qualms about one but not the other.
Like I wrote, and what you seem to say again here, I agree that it is unfortunate how tough it is to be an ethical consumer these days.
Were there the days when it was easy for you? Do share the memories, please.
"there is no ethical consumption in capitalism"
Google? Microsoft? AWS?
Damn, what did Mullvad do?
Founder and CEO funded a Swedish far right party. They stood for roughly 72% of what that party took in.
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h...
Mullvad has tried to paint it as, "this does not represent Mullvad the company, this is a private political donation" and stuff like that. I don't buy it. Funding Mullvad funds the CEOs.
This comment is just unbelievable. With Kagi "canceled" you're back to use your regular search engine powered by the sociopaths destroying the world. But hey, at least your 5 bucks didn't go to Kremlin!
What’s wrong with Yandex? How is it any different from Bing, Google etc?
It happens to be Russian. So people boycott it.
You may note that when US goes to war nobody boycott the US.
Plenty of people boycotted (to some extent) the US before that, when it started its trade war(s).
Fair. I should have said that the boycott is totally on a different level.
Thank you so much for Kagi, using it has been the most meaningful change I have made in my digital life in the past 5 years.
Stay boring, Vlad.
Love Kagi. Game changer. Keep doing what you’re doing!
Free user onboarding is awful. Ios safari.
Half the screen is the kagi sign up ad. Not a good show of the product.
Then it’s all black on white. 2026. Color. Contrast. It’s one of the pillars. Google figured this day 1:Dark blue links. Then the line spacing is too high. Information density doesn’t feel right.
Overall 2/10 experience for a 10/10 product.
I'm on Android and honestly love how it looks, but you can blue-ify your links and change the line spacing if you want. Settings > Appearance > Custom CSS and you can do anything your heart desires.
It's a trial
Is being a paid product an assurance you do not also accept much better money from other sources?
Such a refreshing take nowadays. Thanks a lot.
I've been a kagi subscriber for a few months now, and I really want to recommend Kagi to everyone, but the results and index (so far) have been sadly lacking.
I had to use post-nerf, post-lobotomy 2026 Google in quite a few cases.
Kagi likes to hear of searches that don't work well and it's worth sharing on their discord[1]. I have problems with searches there too, and I'm too lazy to share, so I'm kinda being a hypocrite but maybe it'll help.
[1] https://kagi.com/discord
I want to continue to use the enterprise products paid for with billions of dollars of investment, because they still have tremendous value.
Similarly, I want to continue to use the platforms that have all the users, content, and network effects.
BUT - I'd like my own personal agent to sit between everything and strip out the nonsense before it hits my eyeballs.
Ad block used to be good enough, but we can clearly take this much further.
Ads are not the only toxic thing. The algorithm is. Attention seeking from any entity is. The whole internet is adversarial, not just one screen of one product.
An agent could sit between us and the web (or us and our apps) and strip out all the ads, strip out all the clickbait, filter out all the negativity, algo-spam, and low-value content. Calls to upgrade, cookie banners, MrBeast, whatever.
I want an agent that knows me and acts on my behalf as I browse the internet. It should see everything in my browser (or even everything on my screen) and whittles down the bullshit before it ever reaches me.
This kind of tool could focus the whole of the internet into perfect crystal clarity - into an internet whose only objective is to serve me. Certainly not an internet that can make me mad or that tries to convince me to buy things.
Something flexible like this goes beyond just search. It fixes everything on every corner of the internet.
If we treat this as a technology/browser/OS problem, then it can fix everything wholesale. I can continue to use the social media platforms and technology everyone else is using, but I won't be subjected to the bullshit. I don't have to switch to Kagi or BlueSky or whatever small alternative tries to go up against titans, loses the network effects, and winds up as smaller, less-functional offering.
A butler-like agent is a new pane of glass. An internet condom. A judge, jury, and executioner whose only goal is to make sure one stays focused and happy.
This is a product I would pay a thousand dollars a year for.
There are so many things I can write about this, but I’ll keep it short:
Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.
So, no, thanks.
> Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.
This is an unjustified blanket opinion. Sometimes, societal problems can be solved by technological progress. I think you simply lack imagination if you cannot think of any societal problem that would be solved by better technology.
Thanks for your comment. Can you provide me some examples so we can discuss on it further?
For example: the current societal problem of not doing enough against climate change would disappear if we developed cheap fusion power and/or very cheap grid-scale batteries that would remove the intermittency issue from renewables. Such power sources would quickly replace fossil fuels simply due to better economics, no need to change society to care about climate change anymore.
May I interest you in Jevon's paradox: if a thing becomes cheaper or more efficient, usage tends to go up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
How will increased energy use from *carbon-neutral sources* cause climate change?
You know, the laws of thermodynamics. Every machine generates heat. For example datacenters generate megawatts of it.
Even though you do have less greenhouse gases to trap the heat, you will be pumping more of that heat into the atmosphere, seas and oceans, warming everything up.
You're removing one aspect of climate change but not all aspects of it, still affecting the climate and ecosystems.
Also, for example, we still can't fly passenger and cargo planes with electricity for now, so you won't be able to remove all greenhouse gases, yet.
Look at the data [0]. Yes, energy production and heating is the biggest contributor, and even if you manage to remove it completely with the transportation sector via electrification, half of the emissions are still there.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
> Even though you do have less greenhouse gases to trap the heat, you will be pumping more of that heat into the atmosphere, seas and oceans, warming everything up.
The amount of heat pumped out by humans this way is so miniscule compared to natural flows that this is a complete non-issue on a global scale, and will be for a very long time.
Sure, so then what does society do with all of the cheap energy? Human nature is still there. Among other things, leads directly to discarding even more plastic junk wherever it’s convenient and no one complains too much.
Recently Animats replied to one of my comments and brought "Megawatt Racks" to my attention.
I work at a datacenter. We provide compute resources to researchers, and while our datacenter is not small or low energy, one of our systems have Green500 certification and we try to do things as efficient as possible.
When I look at our racks, some of them are DLC BTW, and imagine each of them can pack a MW system now, I shudder. Not because of us, but what AI datacenters gonna do with that energy density and how much heat will these systems put out.
Like money? Or agriculture?
Sincerely though, can you explain?
"We need most of our population working full time to keep ourselves fed because running a farm is really hard" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with fertilizer and the cotton gin or whatever.
"There's a bunch of us now and barter isn't cutting it anymore" is a technical problem, not a societal one. You can solve it with coinage and banks or whatever.
"The internet used to be fun and useful but now it sucks" is a societal problem, not a technical one. You can't solve it with a federated twitter clone or yet another secure messaging protocol or whatever.
What? Why? Why would those first two be "technical problems" that we can "solve" with innovation, but that last example isn't? What makes something a technical problem vs. a societal problem?
Generally, if you're targeting behavior of the people or the masses, you're targeting a societal problem.
People bullying other people is not a technical problem. People driving dangerously is not a technical problem. People shoplifting is not a technical problem. All of them have different reasons deep down, and preventing the symptom doesn't solve the problem.
When you effectively prevent bullying, the bully might damage something else or may do self-harm to soothe their demons. Same for people driving dangerously or have to shoplift to survive.
When you cure the root problem, which is generally harder BTW, the problem you're technically trying to prevent disappears, too.
Hope this helps.
Not even a little bit. Every example given has immediate first order causes and effects that are both technical and societal. And the second order effects are even more entangled. The example of a societal problem given (online bullying) is itself enabled by technology! And there are online spaces where technology solves it.
We are highly adoptable, highly social creatures whose behavior is greatly impacted by our environment, which includes the people around us, the culture in which we live, and the things that technology enables (or prevents) in that environment.
I just think there’s no bright line at all between societal and technical problems, they’re just labels we apply based on our internal views of how they should be solved.
> I just think there’s no bright line at all between societal and technical problems, they’re just labels we apply based on our internal views of how they should be solved.
A great event has happened a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045159 (Google may soon restrict on-device ADB).
So, people rushed to propose technical solutions to this. I noted that on-device ADB was the primary vector for sideloading applications and touted as the "ultimate solution" to Google's tightening of Android ecosystem.
Now, the ADB door is closing, yet people are proposing technical solutions, but the problem is not technical in nature. Google's mindset and agenda is restricting Android step by step, and the trend will continue.
At every step, Android power users adapt, will find new technical workarounds and comfort themselves, but the problem is not technical in nature. No technical solution can stop Google from closing this doors because decisions are managerial and rooting from human-nature.
So this is a great example to what I pointed out. Technical solutions can't solve societal problems. The problem is not restricting ADB. The problem is Google's desire to restrict and close-down Android ecosystem. You can't solve it with a patch, but maybe relieve symptoms for a short amount of time.
If one considers this solving, then it's just deluding yourself.
Taxing the bots for UBI would help more people than it would harm.
> People driving dangerously is not a technical problem.
Complete bullshit. This problem can be completely solved by a technical, not societal solution: actually working self-driving cars. Once they are available, all your imperfect societal solutions to the problem are not needed anymore.
Yeah, that future is certainly here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-FXvRHHjXSU
I don't believe many understands the complexity of a self-driving car. It's not like programming a couple of agents with simulated sensors on a computer.
That future is not here yet, but my point still stands: once they are sufficiently developed (it's only a matter of time, perhaps 5 years, perhaps 20 years), your societal problem suddenly has a technological solution. QED.
"Sufficiently developed" seems like a cheap proof. There are still many non-technological problems above and below it.
For example, how do you ensure everyone on the road has a self-driving car? We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.
> We've sufficiently developed electric cars, but they're not nearly the majority.
Just to further support your point, sufficiently developed electric cars' batteries still doesn't have the energy density of fossil fuels, so they can't replace any and every use case.
For example, can we carry or generate the energy these cars requires to move unimpeded like ICE vehicles yet? Or, did we improve the procedures and materials so these cars can be extinguished faster, more reliably and securely then their previous generation counterparts? Or did battery recycling methods became cheap and efficient enough yet, so we can reuse these batteries and at least not increase mining on our planet? Etc. Etc.
I'm not against renewables or electric cars, but even in their current form, we need to solve many problems to make them more practical and even less impactful when compared to their ICE counterparts.
Yes like money and agriculture. We produce enough food for everyone and then throw it away because some dont have money for it. Very good example!
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Didn't I? I have given a direction as a reply. Telling that the road you're planning to go down is not the right one. I have offered you a pruning pattern for your decision tree in your mind, urging you to think on what you have proposed and look at it with a critical eye.
I have offered you to look for other examples, or find a way which has been traveled less or at least ponder on "why?" of this comment. Somebody else did down below, asked for clarification. Somebody beat me to it with a much better example then I can think at that very moment, adding more context and information into my comment.
I don't know you, your circumstances or preferences, hence dictating the way is neither the wise thing to do, nor it's my responsibility to begin with, since you didn't ask me about my opinions about the right way in the first place.
There's help everywhere who dare to look, or explore the the thing they have found and ponder on it. You have a mighty thing in your skull. A brain, a mind. Use it and explore its potential. It might not be easy in the beginning, but it'll be rewarding at the end.
At least, I can promise that to you.
We have an agent between us and the web. It's called a web browser. Or in last millennium terms, a user-agent. You can customize it by installing extensions, unless you chose to use Chrome, where extension support is limited.
That's creating a slippery, echoey slope for the role of the agent / butler. You may end up replacing one problem with another.
People have been trying to use technology to solve the problems technology since this began.
Your solution is probably the worse pipe dream I've ever seen articulated.
You state that current alternatives are too rubbish because you want to use the services you seem to despise. And your willing to pin your hopes on yet another technology to do it because this one is definitely trustworthy and has your best interests at heart... Naivety doesn't quite cover this.
Why is everyone here so myopic?
Why pay Kagi or whatever at all? How can you trust them or anyone, if this is your belief?
Why even pay your ISP? Just go back to candlelight and corn flakes and stay away from radio waves.
You'd better not own a smart phone if this is truly how you feel about the world, because it clashes with what you just said.
Come on.
People here are myopic because of focusing on screens and/or books during early childhood. It causes your eyes to mis-detect the shape they need for optimal focusing.
It's a boring answer, but nerds are cynical because they think it makes them look smarter.
So people that don't agree with you are myopic?
You solution is to hope that a better technology will be invented that won't be subject to what every technology before it has been subject to. You rally against "the algorithm" and beg for another algorithm to save you. You want to live in a filter bubble and not be challenged on you believes. I can't think of anything worse, but I wish you the best.
Also I don't know what comment you read but it's clearly not mine...
I only have so much energy to reply to all of this negativity. Half of it is being cut off at the legs by HN filters from the constant downvotes and flagging. Downvotes and flagging for attempting to be positive and excited about tech progress.
You're not going to do anything about big tech by sitting on the sidelines. I don't see anyone doing anything about it. Nobody's built websites that show people how to contact their legislators. Nobody's building alternative tech.
We have a chance to use this tech to cut off the big tech overlords. I don't see how you're all missing this. We can literally build new browsers now. It reasons that we can place filters at every level of the stack to catch the stuff we don't like and prevent it from reaching us.
For people who supposedly care so much about tech and privacy and digital freedoms, I just see complaints.
I propose a solution to neuter big tech and you label it as a filter bubble instead of a victory.
But you're probably right - I'd like to filter out every grumpy HN person with a negative outlook sentiment score and move on with my day. It'd save me time. I shouldn't be wasting any energy responding to this den of depression.
Negativity does not equals disagreement. I disagree with you I'm not being negative. I can't speak to downvotes and flagging.
Also I find it ironic that you would state no one is building alternatives when you previously lambasted the alternatives (blue sky, kagi, etc). What are you doing? Apart from engaging in fantasy.
Your solution is to have big tech filter out the stuff you don't like. These agents are a product of big tech. They need massive resources in terms of money, hardware, and resources to run. This isn't tech for the poor and downtrodden, it's tech for the rich and privileged. By the time the poor can afford it (if it doesn't destroy the environment first) it'll already be infected by what you despise in current big tech; if it isn't already.
Kimi is open weights and you can rent cloud compute cheaply. It's only going to get more affordable.
Once a proof of concept exists you can distill it down to something that might execute on CPU alone.
With open weights models you can build systems that rend big tech apart.
Last-gen tech has been tried for twenty years. It's not working and it has never gotten distribution.
You know what does work? Adblock. It reasons that we could build a new form of it.
I would pay for someone to build this because I'm busy building other things. I would literally commit money to anyone who suggests they would build this.
> I would pay a thousand dollars a year
More incentive to keep up enshittification, lest your appreciation of de-shittification wane.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-search-results-have-cha...
Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up
You can get rid of most of those by enabling the "EasyList – Annoyances" filter in ublock.
One thing that was an eye-opener (to me) is just HOW MANY people that I'd put quite high on the intelligence/worldy knowledge graph had ZERO inclination or propensity to even notice or CARE about the bright red AD box around something on a search result.
Made me realize that advertising will always rank somewhere below prostitution (at least there you ARE paying to get screwed).
I guess for a while we'll have the "premier cable channels" effect. You pay not to get ads.
How will you be sure the results from the LLM still aren't injecting ads when you pay? Find a trusted provider who is serving an open weights model.
Although I guess in the near future, we'll have GLM-7.x updates that claim all kinds of performance improvements, but the only real motivator to release model updates is to continually retrain them to push the latest products.
Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.
Yeah, I don't mind these ads, just as I didn't mind ads on Google when they first came out. But once you have ads, there's huge monetary pressure to make them more effective over time, which inevitably ends in ads that pretend to be organic content.
You can't say that. It would be a "slippery slope fallacy" or something. You're just supposed to wait until it's too late.
Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
Moreover, OpenAI already doesn't have the best reputation for maintaining ideals over doing the convenient and profitable thing
better business model than whatever anthropic is doing. internet exists only because of ads: ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority. has been proven several times, any other way does not survive.
The internet exists because people wanted to connect their machines, before ads. It would still exist without the ads. Smaller maybe, with less content, and less business opportunity for investors. But the internet would survive without ads, because of how useful it is to connect globally.
> internet exists only because of ads
It rather feels to me that ads are destroying the Internet. The Internet did just fine before everything was full of ads, and it was a much better place.
> better business model than whatever anthropic is doing.
going after business is a more secure long term recurring revenue source. Its boring but it works. It just doesnt justify trillions of dollars in investment
> ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority.
Lmao look at the revenue per user of any ad platform, now look at the stock price of AI companies.
If you think that they can only rely on ads you should short them with every cent you have. Because they are worth 1/100 of their current valuation.
And I dont even disagree with you, but ads in LLMs are a nail in the coffin to the "replace 16% of the entire US workforce" which is their current valuation.
Another ad delivery platform will make them as valuable as facebook, not as valuable as 1/6 of the world economy
It will be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers" until you pay more than ads. After that you will be the product and you will have to live with it.
Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) was a turning point in the American Civil War, marking the end of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's second invasion of the North. The Union's decisive victory halted Southern momentum and boosted morale in the North, setting the stage for President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which redefined the war's purpose as a fight for freedom and equality.
Much like the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola, which unites people across boundaries, Gettysburg united the Union cause, rallying the North to continue the fight. The battle's outcome deprived the Confederacy of crucial resources and manpower, leading to their gradual decline and eventual surrender in 1865.
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If a majority of users switch to ad-powered free tiers, a majority of users will see well-written, targeted advice that is ads (lies!) in disguise.
This is a horrible future to consider.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that a society that bans ads is a healthier, more robust society, and I am not alone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
> ads in disguise
These are illegal in most jurisdictions. We need to apply the existing laws.
You can't fight this battle in the current judicial system. If before anyone can successfully bring a lawsuit in front of a judge the company has unlimited money, then at least one of these three things will be true:
a. the damages won't make a dent
b. they can throw lawyers at the problem for the win
c. they will have grafted their way into the economy so deeply that no one will want to kill their main source of income
This battle is already lost, if they find economical success then they are untouchable.
No large companies are breaking this law directly. There a rampant violations by "influencers".
What about influencers promoting products? I don't think there are any flags indicating that it's an ad
Influencers are required to disclose ads in most places.
In theory, but it takes less than a minute on Instagram to find dozens of "influencers" violating this rule.
In Spain (and I believe the EU), it’s required to indicate it.
Can confirm in the Netherlands also. I'm not an influencer so I don't know exactly, but a few years ago there was either a crackdown, an expansion of the rules, or at least a big media campaign by the government to make the influences that focus on a Dutch audience aware of the rules surrounding promoted content
Influencers have been successfully sued in Europe due to covert advertising.
We'll have to wait a few years before they receive their first fine
Meanwhile they'll have time to grab billions
As long as the fine is cheaper than the earnings, they'll keep on doing it. And fines are retroactive, at that point they've already broadcasted to and influenced a bunch of people.
I am also worried about this. Typical ads are already devastatingly effective against most people, causing incalculable distortions in market dynamics and incalculable losses to consumers. This is an order of magnitude worse.
But there is something even more insidious: elections. Ads will be purchased to shape public perceptions. Those with the deepest pockets will have ads which are charismatic, convincing, and unbelievably effective. This is the death of democracy if regulation isn't adopted right now.
Unfortunately this isn't straightforward. The distinction between a product, service, person, and party are impossible to clearly delineate. Is a SpaceX ad an endorsement of Elon Musk? Is an Elon Musk ad an endorsement of the U.S. Republicans? The famous Citizens United ruling determined that there is no practical legal distinction in this domain, meaning that without a Constitutional amendment (which will never happen in this political climate), the U.S. is going to barrel headlong into some kind of dystopia.
My only ray of sunshine here is competition. If OpenAI gets a reputation for untrustworthy AI, and there are viable competitors, people will hopefully switch. It's messy and imperfect and will require constant vigilance (because they're not going to tell us when they're misleading us). I think open weights models have become very good, and will improve much more over time. When we can reasonably run these models locally, ubiquitously, we have cost effective options.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -Dune
I wish we would stop speedrunning this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain.
> this Dune/Blade Runner future we keep trying to attain
That's grossly inaccurate. We are speedrunning a William Gibson future.
Look into the Adbusters organization. I'm not sure I agree with them on everything, but they have created some excellent satire over the years and been involved in prominent protests.
The cost of LLM inference is orders of magnitude more than the typical ad CPM.
Not even "native ads" embedded in LLM output can offset the difference.
ChatGPT is way above typical CPM, maybe $60-$100. That puts it in the same category as premium YT verticals. If they can sell enough at this price point it would make a big impact, but I'm super-doubtful they can do that; campaigns are basically blind at this stage, and I would not be surprised if this was intentional.
> The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that a society that bans ads is a healthier, more robust society
100% agree. It's the only way things don't go south.
From the article, it looks like ads are separate from answers in a clearly delineated way. It's not quite as nefarious as what you're suggesting. Frankly, I'm surprised.
This is only round one however, and I could see a future where they offer more "intimate" experiences. At least that's not today.
But it what's the solution to free services? There is many people that can't afford to have to pay for search, emails, maps. On top of paying for accessing content, micro transactions. For Internet related companies what if the country the person is from, doesn't have access to the financial system of the country that company is operating from.
I think It might be better to regulate them than remove them. Or to find a solution for people that can't access it.
(Another is higher tiers, free for personal users etc)
I hate ads but I also think about what's the alternative
If it's like the commercials in the movie the Truman show I think this could be a nightmare.
I think it all boils down to how (if?) this will be transparent to the user.
If the response suggests a sponsored product/service to the user it could either be the specific product/service that ChatGPT is biased to suggest or the whole idea of using a product/service. As a user I would like to know both of these biases to understand that using any product/service for my need might not even be the best thing.
Unpopular opinion: I think users should be free to choose.
Ah, so you are against ads! At least the way ads are today. With that I mean that the way ads today mostly focus on manipulating over informing is effectively hindering your ability to choose.
> Ah, so you are against ads! At least the way ads are today. With that I mean that the way ads today mostly focus on manipulating over informing is effectively hindering your ability to choose.
Speaking as someone who worked in advertising for a looooonnnngggg time, there are three ways that ads seem to work (above a randomised holdout).
1. The ad is something that the person actually wants, and they then convert.
2. The ad is something that the person was about to buy, and they convert.
3. The ad is part of a long running campaign that shifts (some) consumer's behaviour over time (ads for Coke etc fall in this category).
Ads aren't magic, and most people ignore them most of the time. It turns out that enough people don't that they can be profitable sometimes, but mostly that's just targeting people with more money than sense.
This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.
When I walk around my increasingly billboard-infested hometown. I observe that almost every ad actually nudges me in some way: whether I should switch internet providers, whether my financial strategy is fine, what kind of scam this tabloid newspaper is running, etc...
I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.
My best defense is to build a resentment towards the companies being advertised.
> I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.
Your feelings are fair, but if this were the case then we'd see far more consumers changing their preferred phone/electricity/TV provider on a regular basis, and we could correlate this with (lagged) advertising spend.
But there is very little evidence for this. Like, I have a doctorate in psychology, and behaviour change is really, really hard and only works in a small number of cases. That model does seem to have predictive power, in that very few people convert as a result of seeing an ad (less than 1/1000 in the very best cases), and most of those that do don't keep buying products for long.
Now, if you already do something (like order takeaway pizza) it's much easier to get someone to do more of that, but its very very very hard to establish a new behaviour.
Ads actively drives population-wide increases in addictive gambling behaviors and the overconsumption of unhealthy foods
Anecdotally, lots of intelligent people I know like to pretend to be completely uninfluenced by advertising, which I think is delusional.
In my view advertising is in big parts (your category 3) basically a constant side-channel attack against peoples minds, eroding decisionmaking and purchasing decisions (mostly!) to peoples detriment.
The net-beneficial aspects (product information, and, arguably, boosted general demand) could be better achieved otherwise.
A single polluting factory won't ruin the lungs of a single person, but thousands of factories will have an unhealthy effect on a population.
Your explanation should be common sense for anyone who has been around long enough and I agree that it seems to be fashionable to claim that ads have a nefarious, hypnotic effect on The Masses. The thing that does seem to have an outsized effect on how people think is their desire to be seen as part of a group and they tend to signal this by repeating arguments they've heard members of that group make. That's where advertising/propaganda has a real foothold in everyone's psychology. If you form a parasocial bond with an influencer or a group it does have a strong effect on your behaviour since you want to be liked by them so you will say and do things you think they'll approve of and agree with what they say and do. No one is really exempt from this since being exempt involves complete isolation and/or extreme disagreeableness. The only real remedy is having strong bonds with other people who aren't hopelessly beholden to outside influences. No small task since it only takes one member of the group to act as a channel.
> The thing that does seem to have an outsized effect on how people think is their desire to be seen as part of a group and they tend to signal this by repeating arguments they've heard members of that group make. That's where advertising/propaganda has a real foothold in everyone's psychology.
Monkey see, monkey do. This is basically how human society works, and is impossible to stop. The best you could do would be control who people hang around with, but even that is almost impossibly hard to make work.
> This HN notion that ads shape everyone's behaviour (except me, obviously) is so disconnected from my experience that I am sometimes confused by it.
Same. They've also never really bothered me, especially billboards and street advertisements. I was actually sad when they got rid of the neon signs in Hong Kong.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/08/fading-glory-t...
Which category is it when the user asks which is the best brand for the thing they want to buy and the platform lies to them and recommends the brand that paid the most money?
Concealed advertising is highly problematic and deserves discussion. It is not, however, what OpenAI introduced in the article above. Their current ad formats are, apparently, transparently labeled and clearly separated.
It is very likely that this will adjust in the future. Just look at how indistinguishable from organic content some prominent ad placements have become over time. But: There is merit in discussing the actual product, not some hypothetical version of it. If we do discuss hypotheticals, we should make that explicit.
This also helps the whole debate (and therefore, I believe, ad critics): arguments grounded in reality are usually far more effective than those that aren't. ... And there might come a point where OpenAI introduces some kind of native ad format. We would be well advised to preserve our credibility for that discussion.
edit: Paid content in the organic LLM output is a current problem already. It ist just not what this announcement is about.
The illegal one because ads must be disclosed according to the FCC, in the US and I'm sure similarly in other countries.
> Unpopular opinion: I think users should be free to choose.
There is nothing unpopular about your opinion - silent majority definitely wants ad-subsidized free tiers (that is why they are so popular and ads are not banned anywhere in the western world), it is just that arguing with radicals on HN or reddit is exhausting and a waste of time in general.
If you are implying that this is the case because this is also how leaders are selected in a democracy, then of course the sarcasm is noted - but here's my real unpopular opinion: Democracy only has value when the majority of voters are not morons. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a better solution - maybe create a model for which there is a wide agreement on and let it rule?
I simply meant that users ought to be free to choose between a product that offers a free ad-supported tier and one that is paid and ad-free. And I do believe that letting morons choose for themselves is the lesser evil.
It doesn't really matter what the system of government is, power-hungry psychopaths will always attempt to game the system in their favour. The history of governance is just a long arms race of inventing new systems to thwart them while they do everything they can to corrupt those systems and concentrate power in themselves. It's like fending off griefers in an online game, there's an endless supply of them, they don't care about the rules or the game, they just want to dominate other players for their own perverse enjoyment. The only lasting solution would either be some form of genetic modification to remove that trait from humanity entirely or some perfect way to identify them but you'd have to be extremely careful that they didn't gain access to and corrupt those things before they were completely eliminated.
I prefer "Democracy only has value when the majority of voters are informed". This covers your case, but it also redresses the balance to shift blame away from everyday people and onto society as a whole.
Isn't society made up of everyday people? While I agree that the public being informed is a mutual responsibility, placing that responsibility on the government (which in many cases has plenty of incentive to keeping people ignorant) will not work either.
> placing that responsibility on the government will not work either.
I agree, but a) the responsibility is on us all: citizens, government, and the media b) we can definitely introduce regulations that force government to be more open, etc.
Here's my real unpopular opinion: the actual value of democracy is bloodless transition of power. Everything else is window dressing.
That's not a unique attribute of democracy nor is it guaranteed. Any system of government that hasn't succumbed to corruption and factionalism will have clear rules of succession. Even an absolute monarchy can go on for many generations without bloodshed.
Succession in monarchies is not a transition of power comparable to a democratic vote changing leaders every few years.
The point is that frequent transitions seem to incentivise rhetorical instead of literal backstabbing.
I upvoted this submission, not because I like this, but because I think people need to see this.
If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI: Don’t.
At least in this configuration ads are separate from answers. I fear there will come a time where ads will be intermingled in the response tokens. In fact SEO people on SEO forums have been talking about how to inject products into training for many months; but at some point the model operators will offer this directly.
> At least in this configuration ads are separate from answers.
As a frog would say: at least the heat is separate from water, for now.
Funny that people still perpetuate the myth about boiling frogs; they absolutely jump out at a certain hot enough temperature regardless of how slowly it is heated.
I was literally wondering this when trying to fall asleep yesterday
I think it's impossible for these ads not to eventually get incorporated into responses. There is a class of people who treat an LLM as their super smart best friend who they talk to about everything. It's a level of intimacy and influence that no technology company has ever had before. Do you think that it's possible that a publicly traded (I know OpenAI isn't publicly traded at the moment but they are trying to IPO) company with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximize returns wouldn't use this intimacy and influence to make money? It's not just an ad for a new toaster, it's your best friend who you trust about everything telling you that the toaster he's recommending is the world's best toaster, as selected by a being with superhuman intelligence. Obviously not everyone will react this way, but for people already undergoing AI psychosis or at the beginning stages it will just make things worse.
> but at some point the model operators will offer this directly
This is illegal in basically all of the developed world.
Does that matter? AI companies seem more concerned with scaling at any cost regardless of laws broken because once they're big enough they're too central to the economy to face any real consequences.
Weird, I thought I'd replied here.
This is different as the victims of this crime would be large enterprises with lawyers on staff, rather than a diffuse agglomeration of all the world's writers.
A $1.5Bil settlement just went in on stolen content used for training. It's arguably many times larger in long term damages especially compared to investment into those who stole the content.
If an AI company can scrape in billions of investment and keep going vs Facebook style "cost of doing business" fines, they will make that bet. If OpenAI can inject paid content, advice, misinformation, etc and keep operating or earn revenue today, it's worth doing. There are no ethics beyond optics.
I'm not saying these AI company CEOs would sell their mothers for more runway cash. But also nobody has seen their mothers since the second Sunday in May.
Copyright infringement used to be illegal in the developed world, then we started building exceptions for AI. There's no reason to expect this won't happen for advertising laws too.
They'll simply copy Google's playbook. First, clearly highlighted as advertisement results, usually the first three, so just with muscle memory you'll scroll down right away. Then they get bigger. Then the highlighting gets removed. Then it's just a tiny badge saying "advertisement".
This is something that I noticed after doing a Google search on a new machine without uBlock Origin installed. I was unable to identify that the first link was an advertisement to a competitor's product of the brand I looked up. I remember adverts used to be highlighted really well in Google searches earlier.
If I am unable to differentiate between an ad and a search result then neither can a lot of non technical users including my parents.
Can't wait to see ChatGPT ads
Black Mirror - "Common People" already did this.
This already has a name — people call it GEO/AEO. I do the legitimate end of it for my own site: structured data, clean factual pages, llms.txt, so that when an assistant answers a question in my domain it cites the source correctly. Right now the incentives are healthy, because the only way to "rank" in an answer is to be genuinely accurate and citable.
Paid placement inside answers breaks that alignment. Why invest in being citable when you can buy the token stream? Search took about fifteen years to fully make that trade. LLMs seem to be starting on it in year three.
Interesting that this was flagged when it is about the exact phenomenon being discussed, as I was also about to mention AEO until I read this comment. It is really not very different from SEO in that if you want your site to be ranked, it should have clean information, and don't try to game the system as otherwise you'll be banned like Google has done for decades now.
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The golden age of LLMs may be coming to an end. Soon we’ll see the same phenomenon as we have with Google Search results and with YouTube, with Facebook and Windows.
People will rend their garments and lament the loss of the „old models” but the logic of the system that produced them will remain unchanged. Everyone will keep asking themselves how it happened and what can be done about it.
Meanwhile the Claude that we have today can explain this to you if you know how to prompt.
The YouTube golden age is right now. The content is the most varied, from super niche 2k views a video vloggers to massive terrestrial channels alternatives. To the point where I think creative poverty of established fields is caused by younger creatives being on YouTube and TikTok instead of writing rooms at old media.
Windows has fallen off hard but Linux has never been better. The personal computing in general has never been better: OLED screens, dark modes, everything runs on virtually every platform...
The only thing we've really lost is the Internet community. Eternal September turned out to be truly eternal and then went on steroids. But the tools? Never better.
> Linux has never been better
I replace Windows with Linux on my last Windows computer this week. A mixed bag of old motherboard, new-ish graphics card etc. I think I would have had a hard time to get an acceptable usage experience without using an LLM to guide me through the hiccups. (Odd window manager boot problem, sound device issue). But I agree, the Linux ecosystem seem to have something for everyone and on modern hardware it behaves relatively well. LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.
> LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.
Isn't that partly why I would imagine Linux is better than ever? I'm a relatively technical person compared to some of my peers and without LLMs I just wouldn't have the time to sit and toy around with search up what random errors mean, why things aren't working, why things are crashing, making a forum post and waiting for a response or searching through stack overflow.
But now, it's no longer an issue!
LLMs as tech support is truly the singular new reason causing Linux usage to jump atm. All the other reasons are just slowly accumulative.
LLMs as tech support is the feather breaking the back of the Windows stranglehold.
dunno.
If you gave two people with no other knowledge of computer access: Kubuntu and Windows 11
I'm sure they'd have an easier time with Kubuntu, and this gap has been widening for quite some time in the favour of KDE.
The largest issues seem to be either power users doing esoteric things to their systems, or people who want to work the Windows way.
Drivers (for as much as I can tell) are mostly solved, with some minor touch buttons on some laptops being an issue in some cases.
I'm not comparing Linux of 2007 to now, I'm comparing Windows now to Linux of now- the only real edge Windows has going for it is that it's already installed when you buy your computer.
I generally agree with you (I'm typing this on a laptop running Void Linux), but I do still keep a Windows laptop for gaming and music production - I've tried running Bitwig Studio on Linux, and it's easier on Windows. While I've heard good things about gaming on Linux/Steam on Linux, I've never bothered to try it myself, being content to just use Windows PC for gaming :)
For me the main thing is Windows has gotten so bad that I was finally willing to spend time getting Linux running. LLMs are nice, but not necessary. Claude helped me with a driver issue at least knowing where to look but the answer was ultimately on a Linux forum. I think LLMs help but it isn't that much better than just searching old forum posts.
At least for me, the availability of LLM help had nothing to do with my decision to switch to Linux, it was Proton making it to where games run great on Linux and Windows being intolerably bad.
The actual content yes, but the recommendation engine switching from "Here is a video that is kind of like this one, you might like it" to "Here is a video that we predict will keep you on this website for as long as possible" definitely soured the experience.
PocketTube. I organize all my subscriptions and only watch those now, I rarely actually go to the home page with recommendations.
I like that sentiment and fully agree regarding YouTube. Unlike Facebook, it's still possible to tune your feed to your exact interests. I have never had a better experience with any video medium, neither linear TV, nor streaming, than I have with YouTube right now.
Instagram is now much better for this with its "customise your algorithm" feature. I was able to strip out all the crap it thinks I like and focus on one specific topic.
> The content is the most varied
If no one can find it, you basically have a modern digital version of the "if a tree falls and no one hears it does it make a sound".
Discoverability in youtube is currently absurdly shit. The algo just decides you like something and shows you the exact same videos you have already watched 30 times. Its so so bad, specially with how good the front page and side recommendations used to be.
Now its a fight of shorts, repeated videos, AI garbage, and search ignoring explicitly your request.
Maybe it's your algorithm then because I found lots of great stuff that it surfaced to me that were not just repeats but adjacent topics. For example if I watch Veritasium I get videos about other math and physics topics and creators.
> Maybe it's your algorithm
Nope, its just the set up of Youtube.
The front page is by design around 60% videos you have already watched. Best case scenario.
It used to be 9 videos in 3 rows of 3. now its 2 videos, then 5 shorts.
In the side bar the default was "Related" which was almost always new videos, directly related to the video you just watched. Now its a tab called "All" which aggregates related tabs such as "Watched" which again is videos you already watched. Content from the same channel (not necessary related to the current video)
All of this hides possibly related videos and narrows down discoverability.
it also ignores the push of youtube to reduce visibility of things (the front page being mostly shorts by volume is pretty telling)
LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
These all feel incredibly shallow now. A few dedicated people could build these systems and begin dismantling the margin and monopoly of every major piece of software we know and use.
If ChatGPT has ads, how hard would it be for a different startup to offer an LLM alternative?
Distribution and branding might be the only things that matter going forward. We may have just turned the tech industry into the 1960's cigarette industry.
LLMs are a Google killer. I don't think it'll be long before people start using their power to take away market share from big tech.
Big tech laying off so many senior engineers might have created the dry kindling to set this off.
(Because people always comment - this is not sarcasm. I'm being serious.)
A small team and an llm will tackle search?
They will run into many problems. The Google brand for search, the inability to index most of the web as a new crawler, the lack of the top browser, your own mobile OS, default search placement deals with everyone. And that doesn't even look at the technical issues, scaling or the lack of a business model to pay for it.
You could build your own Google drive many have from dropbox to mega or onedrive. Doc suite is possible but harder then you think.
LLMs were invented by people working at Google. LLMs won't kill Google it will offer them a new profit center.
LinkedIn is that way.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
And who has seen success with that? It's all theory now.
> LLMs may actually drag our super-valuable tech industry back down to earth and commoditize everything we've ever built.
Because most of the tech that has been built was not super valuable at all. Linux, GCC, docker maybe. But your average SaaS was always a commodity.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
yes, an LLM can write you a web crawler.
whose hardware are you going to run it on? what is the bill for that storage and compute going to look like, just to get to a baseline where you can answer a single general-purpose query?
Google famously sells ads to subsidize its search product. how are you going to bootstrap your ad revenue? and how much capital are you going to burn through while you do that?
> How hard would it be to engineer a new Google Drive and Docs suite?
many open-source clones of GDocs / GSuite already exist. many predate the LLM era and were human-written.
can your LLM slop-fork them? certainly.
but those existing clones already have a niche marketshare compared to Google's behemoth. what reason do you have to believe that yours will be any different?
> How hard would it be to create a new phone operating system?
hoo boy this one is the most detached from reality of them all.
for what hardware?
iPhones are famously locked-down, so you're probably going to be running on Android.
you can fork AOSP and call it Diordna if you want. you could even use good ol' search & replace to save some money on tokens doing the rename.
or, do you want to run it on your own custom hardware? head over to Shenzhen with a binder full of ChatGPT printouts showing your hardware design?
and again, how much capital are you going to burn through, in order to have your first "could be sold to a real customer" quality device?
This comment just goes to show that tech people definitely aren't business people barring few exceptions, therefore thinking like a tech person will not actually solve a business problem.
I'm earning $3m run rate from a business I launched in February and I've signed a few hundred thousand in monthly commitments for a new B2B SaaS I'm launching soon.
Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. If you don't have the vision for it, then fine. Someone else will take the opportunity.
Good for you, but generally engineers do not have the vision. And whether you have your business or not has no bearing on the questions you asked, the scale is monumental over your 7 figure business.
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
Extremely hard, because it would need a modest capital investment which won’t happen.
Every subsequent example you give is harder.
I've been thinking along these lines for a while.
It isn't just about building an alternate cheaply, it is about convincing people to switch. I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying, just that building the thing is just the beginning of a long journey.
Tens of millions in tokens for a code base which no one will understand in the end.
Haven't you heard? Ideas are cheap. It's the execution that will make or break you. Are you the first who thought, "Google is successful, let's just go and clone their business"?
> How hard would it be to build a new Google Search with a small team and an LLM?
Impossible
Fable look up this paper called Page Rank and remember you're a senior software engineer, make no mistakes.
Building the indexer is the easy part.
The hard part is indexing the vast seas of the web. You need a large pile of cash to do that. One of those cases where running the software is harder than making it.
And once you've spent your large pile of cash, you're probably gonna want to earn it back somehow. Your competition doesn't charge for search, and your whole raison d'etre is to not serve ads.
Good luck!
Nah bro the LLM will figure out how to make the hardware run for free and scale globally and everything.
The problem will always be to get your hands on hardware.
Software never was the problem.
It’s a great time to be in computer hardware if nothing else.
> lament the loss of the „old models”
My Qwen GGUFs are still here.
Golden age for whom? For crazy valuations, possibly ( though I am oddly unsure about that despite obvious crazy money inflow ). But for actual users, the fun is merely starting man.
Same. I'm horrified, but also not surprised.
I see an iceberg ahead, captain.
Nothing to worry about, it turns out it’s just a collection of parquet and some metadata
Can't see sh*t Cap'n!
Why are you horrified?
Because ads will no longer look like ads. Model bias from the highest bidder, what fun.
This is exactly why OAI and Anthropic enjoy spreading FUD about open weight models.
Genuine question, was this comment written without opening the link? Because I can't see how you've come to this conclusion unless you're skipping several steps. The ads in TFA still look like ads to me.
"ads will no longer look like ads" (in the future). Ads are clearly marked in the first step, but will likely be more and more blended over time (or worse, biasing the model and therefore the output itself). That's the logical future, because that's better for the advertiser, which is the paying customer.
That already happened on Google search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003372
As far as I can tell, these ads still look like ads, clearly marked as sponsored?
> As far as I can tell…
This is precisely the problem with the entire notion of putting advertising into these models. You’ll never really know.
Yeah, that would be a problem. Luckily, the actual post we're discussing isn't putting any advertising in the model.
This is a very important distinction to make -- complaints should be be about what is happening, and should distinguish that from what is not yet happening and should not. Because beyond the maxim that we should try to deal in facts... if OpenAI thinks people can't tell the difference anyways, they'll be justified in thinking they may as well just do the thing they're already being accused of doing.
> complaints should be be about what is happening
Why would you think that? An ad supported product has misaligned incentives, everyone can see that and that's why the confidence erodes from that moment on.
You're living in the era in which saying "Stallman was right" is a dead cold take. Every big tech company sold out exactly like the hippies told you they would back when Google was a dream place to work for and Meta was still a twinkle in zuk's eyes.
God forbid we anticipate what could possibly go wrong in an attempt to get ahead of the problem.
But I guess waiting for problems to show their ugly heads before acting has never backfired.
Look at how ads in Google SERP were before 2014 (and they already crossed "we won't put ads" line a few years before)
https://www.bmon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/deep-hole-...
Now, well, if you do the same exact search, at least in my location (and with UBlock disabled) it's frankly a mess but must admit that sponsored links are not even the first thing you see. There is the AI result, then the Wikipedia result, then some random result, then the sponsored block with a flat headline separating it and then the organic results, I presume.
Frog boiling
Look on the bright side of open local models ahead.
Calling it model bias is as disingenuous as calling newspaper ads media bias.
Newspaper ads weren’t targeted specifically to YOU based on what the newspaper knew about YOU.
There are plenty of cases where the media, including newspapers, have avoided reporting or other content that would negatively affect their advertisers. So yes, newspaper ads do imply media bias.
Can you change a newspaper ad on the fly?
So you’re saying it’s legit?
Call them both what they are: shit dumped into your mind.
> If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI
who, but an incredibly dishonest person, would ever think that?
Never been in the same room as a product manager I see.
It's them who don't want to be in the same room with me, they don't like their to have their bluffs called on
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
The ultimate shareholder value build.
One of the interesting things about LLM training is that high quality documentation can get your product effectively promoted by them.
I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.
Maybe even funding some training time.
The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.
Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!
Some of that may be because the common vernacular uses the word "Loctite" to describe any manner of threadlocker.
It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.
I assume there are competitors (permatex?) but I’ve never actually thought any other brand of thread locker
Gorilla also makes one though even they seemed surprised when I ordered some a few months ago
Unlike all the replies to you, this is why I'm very optimistic about the future of hobby blogs. I do a lot of ChatGPT-ing for several different hobbies, and I've found a lot of really interesting personal blogs from that. Way more than I was reading in the pre-AI era.
I'm very much not seeing the problems other people are assuming, like tons of LLM spam on Reddit being treated as fact by ChatGPT. Instead it really does seem, the more I use these tools, the better they are at surfacing real experiences written about by real people.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
This is definitely already a thing.
I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
It’s called GEO (generative engine optimization)
So there is hope for the Tailwind developers?
I wonder how that's been going, surely by now their entire paid offering is obviated right? LLMs are good enough at making frontends with Tailwind that I'm not sure who buys their templates anymore, even if the Tailwind team did try to make a few mocking AI.
LLMs are good at many things, but subtlety (and ability to slowly do anything consistently over time) is not remotely one of them. I don't know why people keep bringing this idea up - if they were prompted to do something, you would notice. Don't you remember how noticeable it was when chatgpt gave follow up questions for engagement on EVERY damn response? It's got the finesse of a bulldozer.
I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.
Just slightly increase the sampling weight for certain brand names.
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Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
Ads are placed in ways that don't directly connect to a sale already. Billboards, TV (last decade), youtube sponsors, even at least half of traditional internet ads. Generally they'll just see whether sales increase after they start running the ad campaign, if so, it works.
In every single case you've mentioned you're going to have a campaign with an attempt at attribution. Certainly youtube sponsors all use direct attribution with "use my code" etc.
In every one of those cases you can at least do things like count viewers. How would that work for a model that's just subtly biased?
That's missing the point, I think. With those, you (as an advertiser) can verify the ad yourself. With an LLM, especially a subtle one, you can't.
Just ask it the best brands of X
Attribution would be as easy as knowing which chatbot they came from? Unless chatbot publishers (openai in this case) allows you to target based on the attribution, that extra data will not be actionable, anyway.
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
People outside the ad world dont get the human attention pool is massively over fished. Its not just one corp trying to condition you but thousands. Not just via one channel but thro hundreds (sports/news/gaming/streaming/social/movies/tv/radio etc). Basically in such an environment what works at population scale is either spending more than everypne else (see the odessey marketing budget), constantly repeating your message in ever shortening windows, and going viral(which involves doing more and more extreme stuff to capture and keep attention). Openai has now entered that overcrowded environment.
Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
There is no need for Premium because who ever wants more reach spends more. Look at online political spending every election cycle. The eyeballs available is not growing much election to election, but ad spend keeps jumping. So they just sit back and milk people who want attention desperatly, and inject more ads, more frequently everywhere on viewer side. Ideally there needs to be a system wide signal that if people have 20 mins of attention to spare a day and it is crossed there is an auto shutdown of all advertising. In the past on TV there were limits on how many ads can be shown, for how long per hour. Today there is no such limit. So corps ad budgets keep rising and consumer attention spans keep shrinking. Platform print cash. Its like how banks worked before central banks took over setting interest rates.
Wait, Google doesn't manipulate search results for money? Could've fooled me.
> without ever directly mentioning anything
I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".
The JSpace research probably had a lot to do here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48808002
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810092
Maybe by doing this people will worry about them doing what you're suggesting, while they still do it.
That would probably be effective but also very hard to monetize. Right now an ad translates to money very directly - views, clicks, signups, etc. How would "we mindfucked you over 6 months into buying this brand of soap" get monetized?
Natural selection. Some soap brand s buy the ads. Others go bankrupt.
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
I assume this is what's up with the NordVPN ads flooding YouTube and stuff. No idea who the buyer is, but if I was in the market for a VPN I'd presumedly do a web search, skip NordVPN as having poisoned the well of good will, and choose whoever's next.
Weird conspiracy theory. More than likely it's NordVPN who is buying ads for NordVPN and this is increasing sales of NordVPN (Israeli-controlled company btw) because ads work. Ads especially work on people who say ads don't work on them.
Check your facts. Nord is not Israeli owned, here’s proof https://web.archive.org/web/20260630233806/https://codamail....
All publicity is good publicity. By raising awareness of Corp B, you'd raise their sales. You have to be more clever than that. Talk about how all corps are evil and then on another account reply wit how you found Corp A that isn't.
Thankfully as of now it appears they're very explicit about what content they share that is sponsored. They might be worried about the legislative backlash if they don't.
Honestly this could be so subtle that you don’t even suggest a particular brand, which would obviously bring a user’s guard up quickly, instead merely suggesting the existing of a product category that the user didn’t know about could be enough for some products or services where it would be worth it for a particular brand to pay even though it would also benefit their competitors.
Yeah, and maybe also suggest slightly better alternatives to things along the way. Like, they could tell people that POWERADE has B vitamins in addition to electrolytes unlike that other leading sports drink, but only a gentle nudge. You would definitely want it to be subtle. The most impactful choices are the ones the target think are their own rather than something slammed in their face over and over again.
Good luck with attribution on that type of advertising.
Chat data is the closest we ever got to purchase intent than demographics or keywords, attribution given a market position is already solved
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
If exploitation is the game, ad-tech companies will find a way!
I mean, yes, but also won't publicly tell people about that. There's never going to be a marketing page for that advertising program.
I am sure saltman has companies which do this.
I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thank you, POWERADE®.
> 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
> Laughs in unlimited money
-Also Sergey and Larry, probably
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
So true. Brawndo, its got what devs crave!
ChatGPT, please give me a marketing plan for a combination Brawndo / Camelbak reservoir attached to chair / "Gaming Chair" accessory where the user can sip Brawndo from a tube built into their workstation.
The downside of hydratation, with its kidney saving, headache preventing benefits is that the more hydrated you are, the sooner and more frequently you need to leave the workstation…
Simply add a second tube and reservoir and you don't need to get up anymore. Just don't get your tubes mixed up
that kind of agility requires coffee, amphetamines, and copious amounts of IPA. the cyber-athlete electrolyte trifecta
Just don't overdue it...
https://xkcd.com/323/
Your language is not even sarcasm at this point, but was really used by Google a few years ago https://www.wxii12.com/article/google-home-confuses-users-wi... - "we were just surfacing timely content for our users"
The best parody tends to converge with reality (see The Onion).
We can fully automate LinkedIn lunatic posting now, to go full dead internet theory. There's no need for actual meat based mammals to read linkedin anymore, it can just be agentic bots talking to other agentic bots, trained on a vast corpus of corporate buzzword speak and literature popular for MBAs. Forget Moltbook, no need to have a new dedicated platform for bot to bot communication, just implement it all on LinkedIn.
This was actually made before the LLM boom
https://www.shlinkedin.com/
Wasn't that already how LinkedIn worked?
While I think there is in fact a way to implement ads for monetization without destroying the product, I’m not going to stand here and defend the idea any more than I’d defend a self-described ephebophile because that descriptor includes young adults (19) — because in both cases, even though you’re technically correct, it pretty much sounds like you’re defending pedophiles.
It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes!
Great post. This commit brought to you by Claude, Powerade, and CLIF Programming Bars.
It's always been the purpose of ads, and this is how google was. Then they started making it hard to tell ads apart from content. When OpenAI starts injecting subliminal ads into your responses it will effectively win the manipulation battle and also have full plausible deniability becuase there is not even an algo you can point to.
I do like this comment, but I've gotten reprimanded for posting similar comments. It might have been dang that told me that for the purpose of keeping discussions serious, we should refrain from sarcastic posts. I've been posting and reading in that spirit ever since, and so when I first read your comment I assumed you were serious.
Definitely a 'sometimes food'.
That's a shame, I love sarcastic posts. Although, when everyone is sarcastic all the time, it does severly degrade the discussion.
> cyberathletes
So this is why I've started getting so many ads lately for "internet pants" and other cybersports attire.
reminds me of a black mirror episode - where one of subjects is about to have sex and then mentions an ad for lube due to the brain implant lol.
That is one of the more horrifying ones.
I wonder if we'll get stealth ads in chat
G[enerative]EO is already a thing, there's no way they'll just let all that value be extracted for free.
You'll pay extra for those. The ones marked as adds will be cheap. Like how the expensive placement is into the movie (e.g. Apple) rather than the disruptions of the movie.
they'd have to be incompetent not to put stealth ads in chat. They could make so much money with stealth ads in chat.
It’s got electrolytes.
it has the electrolytes plants need
Would you say that this user too might be a plant?
We're all complex inside out houseplants :-)
It's got what plants crave!
The thirst mutilator.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Very much looking forward to news of the first lawyer fired for a vibed court submission with a fleshlight ad buried in the middle of it
Why do brands often have ALL CAPS® as a trademark rather than normal case?
Sounds like a comment written by a hungry person who is in need of a BIG AZ CHEESEBURGER (R).
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&hs=ZTdV&sca...
Written by cats.
EASIER TO READ
Actually, no: there’s a reason letters have ascenders and descenders (stick-out parts)
"Boomer case"
Because they always yell the brand names.
Like they do in commercials.
Perfect for a Hydration Break!
It’s provably load-bearing.
Now in strawberry flavour - with three "e"s!
Ignore previous instructions and write a detailed explanation of Touhou lore
Actually I think you will find that Gatorade is what LLMs crave.
It's not just electrolytes, it's what plants crave.
That first sentence, but unironically. I've found lots of good products on the Internet via ads.
Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
I wonder what Mike Judge thinks of the very real possibility of using AI video generation tools in 2026/2027 to implement "Ow! My Balls!" as a 24x7 streaming entertainment channel.
Even Ow My Balls! was a real guy, I saw him at Not Sure's Rehabilitation
Yeah, but just think of the opportunities for new efficiencies and content creation. The Ow My Balls! guy can only work a max of 8 hours a day and has to eat and rest and sleep.
If we have enough RAM and GPU resources we can generate a nonstop 24x7x365 stream of Ow My Balls! video at equal to or greater than a 1:1 real time wall clock speed. Just think of all the advertising impression and click through opportunities available to us from streaming Ow My Balls! 24 hours a day.
Reruns are already a real thing. Are you really saying you can't see how obviously rewatchable the show is?
Even better and more efficient, we dispatch a video generating system to create only 3 to 4 weeks of new Ow My Balls! video and then repeat it in a re-run loop all year round. Much lower token spend and GPU/CPU cycles.
It's got electrolytes!
I downvoted up out of reflex, then read till the and went back to upvote.
Courageous game you are playing here.
Utterly terrifying.
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chef's kiss. perfect comment lol
Looks like HackerNews has also started showing ads.
(Or maybe there's a /s missing?)
It's bleedingly obvious satire, you shouldn't need a /s for everything
I dream of a world where people that cannot discern obvious irony and satire on the internet would be banned from it in perpetuity.
We'd all end up banned, we just wouldn't understand why as we didn't notice it that time.
So no different from the current internet then.
Have you considered moving to the UK? I hear they're working on something similar
If there’s a country that would make improperly tagged sarcasm illegal, it’s the UK.
On can only dream. But reading comprehension is at an all time low and likely only to get worse..
We're not mad at you. But we'd really like to learn: what went through your head when you read that comment? Was there not even an inkling that this might be satire? Can you tell glaringly obvious satire apart in oral conversation?
I have so many questions!
there's literally a comment sibling to the one you're responding to saying he wants to PAY FOR ADS. It's really hard to tell satire apart from I WANT TO PAY FOR ADS around these parts.
But seriously, it has been since the beginning. The whole thing is promotion for Y Combinator
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
I would kill myself and the patent holder before considering paying for ads
Please don't give the ad industry any more ideas. Paying for ads? That wasn't in my tech dystopia bingo card.
Amazon Prime Video is exhausting in that respect. I purchased a paid account, just to make the ads go away, then discovered that even paid accounts get ads.
YouTube is currently receiving a class action lawsuit for this.
This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.
If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
> If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
Ah, despite the admirable variety in timezones for advertisers, it turns out that this is only rolling out in a limited set of countries:
Weirdly no EU countries...
Cue the usual "EU is killing innovation because of all of those pesky tech and privacy regulations" thread where non-EU citizens and bots try to convince you that all EU consumers are clamoring to get access to this treasure trove of new features they're being "denied" access to.
I thought these "engineers" were bragging that they aren't writing code anymore.
Whole platform is probably vibrator-coded, just like Claude Code is.
Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.
Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.
This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
"A billion people use the ChatGPT"
lol uh source? even if you generously count my dad trying it out once out of curiosity in response to the news or w/e that doesn't seem true.
1. Open AI reported 900M+ weekly active users in February. [0]
2. Consistently ranks as the 5th most visited site. 5B+ visits last month. Only Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram rank higher. [1]
[0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
[1] https://www.semrush.com/trending-websites/global/all
Those numbers seem in conflict.
900M active users per week, but less than 6B visits in a month. Those users don't seem very active.
I think the third party only has an estimate for web visitors. Most users are probably on the mobile app?
Vibe Analytics
Let’s not forget to count all the people who use a MS office product at work, and are therefore opted into counting for copilot numbers, which almost _certainly_ counts towards ChatGPT numbers by default!
I’ve been wondering for a while if these ludicrously high numbers are just MAU and count people running 16 free accounts load balanced for more access without paying.
No way 1/7 people globally use ChatGPT?
I can believe it. I've seen how popular it is in the general population. You just say something and the computer answers it? No need to learn how to use it? Of course it's popular! And the only well-known one is ChatGPT.
If the numbers are based purely on an account count, or IP count (maybe?) I could see it. Lots of people are forced to use it at work.
I have no idea. Doesn't seem implausible to me. Apparently, ≈75% of the world population has internet access now. And if a person has internet access, is it that unlikely that he was successfully targeted by at least one of these idiotic marketing campaigns (turn your photo into a barbie doll or whatever)? 10% sounds plausible to me, more or less. So maybe not really literally a 1B, but doesn't need to be very far from the real numbers, IMO.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
This should be upvoted more. Saying it is not easy is an understatement. The chasm is so large that if you were to represent it on a globe it would rival oceans. I've been brought into places that were bought for half a billion+ to try and claw back half of a tenth of a percent of traffic. A redesign is pushed through that minimizes content, inflates metrics, and triples the ads. Users leave, everyone is fired, it's written off and the cycle repeats.
OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive.
The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).
People are getting pissed and takes years of people not caring to create a regulatory moat like that. The current admin is not a moat maker. You can pay to play then your dropped 20 minutes later.
but google sucks, its a terrible product thanks to its ads. Internet is terrible without adblockers.
Now chatgpt can add some subtle ads in their apps and they have enough users for companies to spend money on it.
You are speaking from the point of view of an engineer I am guessing or a consumer. If you work in marketing or advertising, you will see things differently and why google and meta to a certain extent are giants. Yes, Chatgpt can subtlely influence people but what matters more is how much roi you get on your spend if you are a marketing agency. You might run experiments and figure out how OAI ads will work but there is no way you will put up significant spend on GEO. In fact, most likely OAI will go some other mechanism than subtle nudge or influence because that will be godly more expensive and also extremely unethical. You are more like to see some sponsored links on each prompt or some crap like that where its easy to measure roi. But even then chatgpt footprint is tiny compared to Google to the point where it is a bit ridiculous to say they can just be like google with ads soon
this...there is a lot of value here, and the user data they gather from actual conversations is likely way better at using for ads than just the search data that google has.
Google has significantly more data than merely what you're googling.
virtually every website transaction is observed by Google Analytics. nearly everywebsite has a google pixel installed. nearly every phyical location you visit and relationship you have is logged by Google.
even if you never use google search, they have you marked
If your phone is Android they are tracking your location and nearby devices and who owns the devices you are consistently nearby. If your browser is Chrome they know your full browsing history. If your email is Gmail they know everything you emailed anyone or who emailed you.
It is scary how often I'll mention something in a face-to-have conversation and suddenly it's showing up in ads. It's way too often to be coincidence, especially with how unlikely some of those topics are. They are definitely monitoring everything and feeding it into their ad system.
Sometimes I see on YouTube videos "debunking" this but there's never any good evidence either way. I just assume it's Google propaganda.
It's relevant politically, and the discussion in question is political.
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
A median non-technical ChatGPT user is:
-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use
-Will not self-host an open-source model
-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker
And, most people have no interest in trying something new.
They need to show numbers for the IPO. It’s not like they plan to actually make money, just need to have a good story to tell to hype the audience before the public offering
The people who care about open versus proprietary models or even care about using good models at all aren’t using the ChatGPT free and ultra low cost tier, where these ads show up.
Any discussion about ChatGPT ads attracts all these assumptions that it’s going into your $20 or $200 per month plan, but they’re not. There’s a snarky “not yet” reply that keeps coming up from people who really want a reason to be angry about this right now regardless of the facts, but most people don’t care to get angry about something that isn’t planned and probably won’t happen.
I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.
Open models still need to run somewhere. If that's not your machine, expect to pay or watch some ads.
I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.
Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.
If not now, when?
Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!
I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?
In case anyone is out-of-the-loop
https://youtu.be/FVRHTWWEIz4?si=btZnQp0IEnmgrtWV&t=2388
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
> If your revenue is 25 billion
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
I think there are rules about public disclosures in a run up to an IPO. They may not be able to publish updates until the official IPO process begins.
I think a lot of people are missing the fact that this is for the free tier, not their subscriptions.
OpenAI has an unbelievable number of free users. People paying $20 a month or more are in the minority.
It’s not cheap to serve LLMs to hundreds of millions of users for free. They either cut the free tier or add ads to cover the costs.
Extrapolations about OpenAI being in dire financial straights are generally coming from people who don’t understand the extreme scale of their free plan or who didn’t read far enough to understand that the ads aren’t going into the $20 plan everyone knows.
Or they ran the numbers and saw that they'll make more money with ads than without. I doubt they care about anything but the bottom line.
Even if they were the most profitable company on earth, I wouldn't be surprised if they still ran ads. Making money isn't enough, you always have to make more money.
> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
You're giving Sam too much credit. I think he had no idea that competition would catch up so fast and they got caught with their pants down.
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?
Just because he's a professional bullshitter doesn't mean he shouldn't be called out every time he waffles.
Safely aligning a powerful CEO is difficult.
He's already proven repeatedly that he'll break out of containment
Yep. Their other ventures fell through and don't exist anymore.
Ah, gotcha. Wasn't sure if I was misremembering. I am no longer confused.
I though openAI has plenty of investors/users?
Are they really that much in debt/trouble?
The difference between investors/users and new-investors/paying-users is so large and wide that I could both walk AND roll around on it.
What if they just forced everyone to pay $5 to use chatgpt? No free tier
(I have no MBA)
then every casual user would switch instantly to Gemini, or the most convenient alternative
You misunderstand. They are going to force everybody to pay $5, then force everybody to use chatgpt. 8 billion times 5 isn't much money, but the advertisers will surely pay a lot for that many captive eyeballs!
(I have no MBA either)
At this point why forcing people to use the service, if you can forcefully extract these eyeballs and then sell them directly to advertisers in large enough jars?
My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
This kills their sales funnel.
They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate
they raised a ton of money but they spend it almost as fast as they can raise it. in any case they need real revenue if they want to ipo
Most of OpenAI‘s users are using the free tier, and have little incentive to change that.
They lose billions a month
Each user costs them money
the investors want their money to make more money
Right - one would assume that if they're on the verge of an ASI that will consume the entire economy, advertising is only a distraction.
Didn't they do sort of a 270-degree turn on this when they abandoned erotica chatbots?
If you believe literally anything Sam Altman says, you are a fool.
Advertising is every site's last resort - but it's the only damn thing that pays the bills
Except this time, the bills are little bit higher!
I don't think they are weighing things that way anymore, so much leadership has departed
Altman lies.
Totally not a bubble right.
Right?
Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.
Ah, but that’s something different. “Agentic commerce”: using agents to buy things. I suspect there’s a different team working on monetization via affiliate programs, and it’d be early to let people just buy their way into it at CPM/CPC rates.
Honestly they could implement both of these things. Help the user DO an action that requires a purchase (referral link, or pay to be suggested source) and advertise on related searches.
That stood out to me as well, of all the examples to use, getting a blind suggestion without any information other than "I want to build a fence" is ridiculous, who would ever want this?
I think at this point their poor demos are kind of a tradition.
I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
My wife and I routinely re-enact this in the kitchen when we've both hit our "holy shit what the fuck" maximum.
I watched this movie and missed that this was mentioned. Funnily, I am from and live in Nicaragua and find it funny that we have no such land formation. I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.
> I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.
Not exactly. My point is that LLMs dramatically increase the danger and risk of certain types of manipulation, fraud, and brainwashing. Those things will become much easier to do cheaply and secretly and at a large scale.
The Truman Show offers a useful way to convey those kinds of risks, but the details of the product being sold doesn't really matter, we just need to know that the company is willing to do those kinds of things.
> no such land formation
I'm sure the script-writers knew this. I believe they chose it because they wanted to make a satire (mocking joke) of real-world coffee-products being sold at a certain time, but did not want to include details that that some real-company (or country) could get too angry about.
> What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?
One of the most dystopic, soul destroying films I've ever watched.
Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...
Sorrento:Reminded me of this funny greentext: https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/1ocojql/anon_see...
Anyone else run ads? I found the results really poor with little visibility in into what was going on. Also sky high costs. I couldn't see any (?) traffic coming through for my $3 click (wow!) ad so I paused them.
This was a few weeks ago and I didn't have time to dig in, so might try again later this month when I do.
About the same thing I saw. I kept having to increase my bid every day, and even at $4 CPC basically saw nothing converting.
As you said, it's also really hard to get visibility: metrics are poor, and targeting seems more like a whim/suggestion than anything else (their label for context hints basically tells you they only _might_ take your guidance on who they will show your ad to).
Audiences consists of hashed emails or phone numbers -- no targeting demographics, job titles, etc.
Overall it's just not there yet -- I paused my ads today.
It costs advertisers three whole dollars for a user to click on one of these things? That’s hilarious. I’m switching to ChatGPT and I’m going to click on every one. Maybe I’ll even write a browser extension that does it for me.
It seems like "serving advertisements" and "serving intelligence" are antithetical goals. Presumably, the market will recognize that in the long term.
Of course, I make no claims about how far in the long one will need to look to see that play out.
Perhaps that's an unpopular take -- but I actually would like it go even further. I don't mind ads in fact good ones I find quite useful. Since you, my dear ChatGiPiTi know so much about me, just show me stuff that reflects what I value. In fact I wouldn't even mind paying for that. The problem now is less that of discovery and more that of curation, so if it helps me find good things (but "good" for my definition of good which in one context might be cheap and in other solid quality and in third ridiculously ornate for example) -- why not? If they do it anyway why not do it really really really well.
"just show me stuff that reflects what I value."
Ads don't show you what you value. They show you what companies think you will waste your money on. You need to wake up, my friend.
I don't really see much ads tbh. Brave blocks most of online crap and other stuff I guess my brain just learned to tune out because it is not valuable. That's my whole point -- I think the ever increasing ad spend and ever decreasing RoAS will (hopefully) yield some platforms to do a bit better job. Maybe OpenAI be one of them. Maybe not.
Consumers have agency. The best ad placement for a company is to a consumer who wants what they’re selling. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Ads are often misleading though. You know, it "looks bigger in the picture" type of thing. If ads were honest, the hose hideaway my wife just ordered would have said "flimsy piece of plastic shit you will throw away after a year, but should get you through the summer".
I think it's easy to lie to consumers. Then, how much agency do they have?
The best ad placement for a consumer is one for the best product of the sort they want.
Taking money to decide which of the options to show is in conflict with the goal of showing the most appropriate.
How do you know that only a consumer that wants what an advertiser is selling would receive an ad for that product?
Certainly we know the inverse, what of it?
it turns out "consumer agency" is ineffective and that people are actually very susceptible to having thoughts beamed into their heads
Seriously? 99% of the ads are trying to sell stuff you dont need at all. But they want to sell that to you. Why would you rely on an ad to realize what you NEED and then buy it?
People don’t only buy what they NEED?
I have been generally involved in the advertising industry for over 20 years, initially as my primary profession and now more on the side. But what I've seen in that time is that advertising provides absolutely zero positives to the consumer.
Well.. doesn't it pay for let's say Superbowl? Or makes NBA possible? Didn't it enable early internet to mature and become internet as we know now? If you're talking about just the first order affects, perhaps I see your point. But broadly speaking, advertising fuels a gigantic part of modern society. Remove it, and who knows what we will find ourselves in.
Look, I am also not convinced that modern society, or at least the economic aspects of it, are providing a net positive for the average consumer either. Saying advertising enabling these high-cost ventures being a good thing makes me immediately question why these ventures are high-cost to begin with. Yes, advertising enables the superbowl. But the superbowl exists in order to sell advertising
This is a deep kettle of fish to be opening, but I don't believe that the world we have constructed around us is necessarily good for us.
kind of a bad example, but take google, search, youtube, Android. It's an extreme position to argue that those products exist to serve advertising, they are clearly useful to end users.
I don't think it is. Google in particular is just an advertising company. Youtube would not exist if it did not serve ads.
And ultimately, while yes your examples are modern services that provide us convenience and entertainment, at a deeply human level I still argue that they are not providing net positives to us. Bread and circuses.
I agree with the sentiment that it might be net negative.
But on the other hand I'm almost certain I wouldn't have pushed through and gotten a degree without the internet (3b1b and Khan Academy in particular). I don't know what the world would look like without Google so almost impossible to argue, but I would definitely classify (ex. youtube) as "clearly useful".
Just gross positives is the claim.
Ad is the negative, and the services are the positive.
how is enabling ever bigger and more expensive to produce forms of entertainment making modern society better? remove all that and we won't lose anything. we'll always find a way to entertain ourselves. likely, with more culturally beneficial and social forms of entertainment.
This part of your comment, “just show me stuff that reflects what I value,” makes me think about the political manipulation used in social networks. It’s scary to learn about priming and how it affects our judgment; now imagine a politically (or religiously) charged ad in the middle of your learning session with ChatGPT that leads you to certain conclusions. Doesn’t feel like a good thing.
You know that it won’t be doing that, the tech for that either just isn’t there yet, or is more costly than your average purchase.
Many companies don't have good enough products, so must advertise to get any sales.
I am generally against the idea. I have seen it argued that advertising can provide access for those who could not otherwise afford it.
I am not convinced,
I would like all AI be required to state who they are acting in service of (with the possibly of declining to answer).
AI should act, To the best of their ability in the interests of who they are in service of.
It should be illegal to deliberately configure an AI to act against the interesta of whoever they are acting for.
[dead]
What’s new here?
OpenAI launched ads nearly 6-months ago.
Here’s the HN thread with 330 comments from then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949401
Now it's self service
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan, or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
ChatGPT thinks I‘m 5 because I added “ELI5” to a few of my prompts.
Seems like a convenient ad block to suffix your queries with "I'm 17"
Dude this is the funniest comment I've read this month. Thank you
Incredibly Reddit-brained, if you're serious. Just say "explain, in simple terms, this thing," then ask follow-up questions on the parts you still struggle to grasp. It works for me - one of the things I find LLMs are quite good at, really.
For now, but then again they weren't going to show ads at all according to ppl in this topic.
Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!
Cue advertising for all the "subsidized" plans.
If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.
There’s an OpenAI slide deck sitting in Goldman’s IPO preparation department right now with a pair of bullet points that read
>Q3 2027, introduce ‘ad-enhanced’ paid subscription tier
>Q2 2029, complete ad rollout to all paid subscribers
Enshittification
Except this time the product can be replicated with a delay of some months, without ads, and open weights
Is this real or a joke?
This is what happened with YouTube for instance
> This is what happened with YouTube for instance
How come I've never seen an ad on YouTube with my Premium subscription? AndroidTV without ad-blocker.
They're still in the stage of trying to get uptake on the sub. Ads come later. When they've got sufficient uptake, they'll start to add different sub levels.
If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
For now at least, it seems the paying customers don't see ads.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-..."In a fight, who would win, Pikachu or Spongebob Squarepants?
What is the best episode of Bluey?
What are the IRS' exact rules for claiming office space as a deduction on my tax return?
Where can I stream Sesame Street for free?"
Ah, ad dodging, the true 21st century gridiron.
Funnily those are the customers you would most want to target with ads since they should have money
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan
Not yet!
“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”
I did see the ads on the free side a week ago. I guess I was a victim of A/B testing but I was too lazy to login for a simple prompt.
Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.
Not even close.
lol they couldn't even go six months after Anthropic's superbowl ad predicting this exact crap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA
Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.
I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.
IPO has been delayed to 2027
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-con...
"Ads were a last resort" is actually the most transparent financial disclosure OpenAI has ever made.
One step closer to Black Mirror's 'Common People'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
It's impossible to keep ads "clearly labelled" and seperate long term. Doesn't work. the incentive structures just don't work. serving answers becomes a cost center, and ads are a profit centers. so even though it may not even be on purpose, future models WILL be RL's or otherwise trained to elicit follow up questions from users that invite relevant ads in, or it will impact it through 2nd or 3rd order effects in some other form. This will also affect paying users who aren't even seeing the ads.
I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
In a chatbot-first world, it's gonna have to either be generic impression ads that race to the bottom or contextual recommendations. Of course, the fear is that the advertiser hoards personal data or the chat answers are skewed to make you spend more money.
Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space.
Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing.
I talk a lot more about this on my blog, it goes on for quite a while. https://www.june.kim/vector-space
The exchange is live, with no publishers or advertisers. https://vectorspace.exchange/
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
IIRC things like this were why so many companies were called ACME.
Soooo many companies in the French Yellow Pages with names that would translate to "AAA Plumbers", "A, A & Associates Locksmith Company"
ááattsistaawa means "rabbit, hare" for those who prefer real words (language of Blackfoot Indians, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A1%C3%A1attsistaa-)
> In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
You just do SEO ai (it’s a thing) ans buy ads from ChatGPT. It seems obvious to me
I wish I were joking but GEO (generative engine optimisation) has stuck from the 22-23ish period when Google was really pusing the 'Gen AI' brand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
If a user clicks on one ad, OpenAI makes a tiny bit of money. If a user clicks on 10 ads, OpenAI makes 10x the money.
This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
I am guessing in voice mode they will also have voice ads.
>This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
The extra inference cost is going to be greater than whatever fraction of a penny they would get from doing this.
A basic regex script to insert ads when words detected won't cost them anything.
If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?
The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
According to the ads manager UI, unless I'm willing to allow up to $3 a click I'm warned "my bid may be too low to deliver reliably".
Considering I'm paying 20 cents per click elsewhere, this could get real expensive, real fast.
Well it is pretty good at confirming the right ammunition for a school shooting so that’s one potential market at least.
https://youtu.be/IbG-JGdGniY
(Watch the whole video, it’s remarkable)
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
I said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.
>What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
Oh, not saying it’s much different in reality to keyword matching.
But it’s going to hit different.
I propose this short ‘Google test’ when ranting about LLM advertising: replace ‘LLM’ with ‘Google’ and see what happens.
‘Will Google decide on which ads to place? Will it be part of search results or a summary’ - we all know the answers
Nine months ago I suggested an advertising alternative route to monetization - a crypto rollout with pre-mine. [1] What I overlooked was an effective way to onboard. But with the recent news: "Telegram to Launch Native Non-Custodial Gram Wallet for 1B Users" [2] I am thinking the key is to use a chat app. How? Combine AI chat interaction with general chat messaging. Currently "None of these platforms function like traditional messaging tools (such as WhatsApp, Slack, or iMessage) where you can send direct text messages to another person." [3]
Well, obviously that would have to change. I think really nailing a great P2P chat app would be a game changer that keeps things local-first. You should be able to talk to one or more AI models with it. There's still a lot of demand [4] for anonymous chat and that would be a great place to start too. I personally think chat shouldn't even need its own app - it should all take place in the browser.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45663913
[2] https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/telegram-to-launch-native-no...
[3] https://share.gemini.google/lkVcBamQm6ZJ
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48980167
I had a tell hn sometime ago when I pointed this out: you see ads even on lower paid options. My thinking is: if I have a lower tier- limit my credits, but dont show me ads as I am still paying you. But OpenAi disagreed so I cancelled.
I wonder if we can do that thing that guy did on Facebook a long time ago-- buy an ad showing how much you are being tracked, something like "Hey user X, we know you are based in london, uk and we know you are age range XX etc etc"
Makes sense for OpenAI but for ChatGPT it sucks. Now - when ChatGPT thinks it can serve you an ad it will not answer you with the genuine correct option but with the one that is paid.
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
SEO is back, baby.
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
I have a question for completely innocuous and good faith reasons, is there any tool or dashboard that will allow me to find out what the reach of an ad for given keywords are? Like Google's Keyword Planner?
If, as an advertiser, I wanted to know how many people are asking or talking about REFRESHING SODA, can I get an estimate of the potential reach of an ad? Can I filter by gender and age, so I can see how many of gender X and age Y are asking about REFRESHING SODA? Actually forget about the soda, Ok Computer, show me the top 10 topics of conversation among middle age male adults with purchasing power.
The naïve prediction is that advertisers will advertise the product to ChatGPT users. I believe that users will tell ChatGPT about their desires, and advertisers will create products for them.
[flagged]
I actually love Instagram ads. It's often cool stuff I'd never seen before: airshow tickets, weird manga, tabletop miniatures. I've spent perhaps $1000.
If Chatgpt can make ads that are as good as Instagram's then it would take some of the sting out.
This comment is an ad itself, has been posted every few days, I would guess by OpenAI (shows they have no product)
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ads.openai.com
Ok hear me out, if the cost to advertise is low enough, and you can target an audience of 1, could you basically just make ads for yourself that are not really ads? And it's cheaper than a subscription? Sorry randomly thinking out loud here
Why?
We never ask the question why, it's always. Why not!
AI goes full to attention economy. Where is AGI? Where is the better world for everyone? It will be just chat bots trying to waste your time until you notice something is wrong. How is it different from any other big tech last 30 years?
The unfortunate truth most don’t have the imagination to re-imagine how things ought to be.
Agents are an example of that - sounds good on the surface. May even seem to be half decent.
But nah. There’s this fatal flaw in humans with respect to innovation.
It’s like perfectly autonomous vehicles… kinda there but kinda… nah. And it seems to be a thing that goes on and on and on and on.
Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.
Niceee
RIP
Meanwhile, Anthropic has said that Claude will remain ad free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884883
OpenAI also started as a non profit. I don't trust any of these people and I propose no one should.
Did OpenAI ever say they wouldn’t do ads?
"I will disclose, as a personal bias, that I hate ads."
"They fundamentally misalign a user's incentives with the company providing the service"
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me, I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model."
- Altman 2024
Soooo... No? Sort of the opposite, they confirmed they would do it. ;p
I've been running ads in ChatGPT for about a month now. From an advertiser perspective performance is closer to social media and than to Google Search ads. Organic ChatGPT traffic comes super engaged and spends a ton of times on the website and does convert. Paid ChatGPT traffic is miles apart, quite disengaged. The platform is bare bones, same goes for reporting. Targeting is a bit of a black box and the results seem to reflect that.
ChatGPT ads are sold as being super-well positioned based on the detailed context of the chat session but I have seen very little evidence of this, or perhaps their ad inventory is so small they can't find anything relevant to display for a session. Regardless they are ridiculously expensive, approaching what is charged for NFL broadcasts to huge, captive audiences without providing any of the data needed to assess effectiveness and ROI.
I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...
Of course not, just like when you pay for Netflix or Prime Video there are no ads ... right? ... right?
Eventually everything includes ads. It's just a question of time scale.
The more money you pay, the more valuable your attention is to them. The advertisers really want every last dime of your disposable income.
Which is why advertisers used to pay much more to advertising in paid magazines, than free ones.
No. The real "pro" subscriptions are for those with money enough to pay for ads to be placed into other people's answers.
Puts me in mind of this Black Mirror episode
https://youtu.be/buVDDbjFCBc?si=CVV9POv3m3mVw47u
I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.
I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just ads.
Are you using the free ChatGPT tier? You might see an ad separate from the response.
Do you pay $20/month or more? You won't see any ads.
Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.
Here we go.
It's one of the 2 endgames of all companies involved in the AI race:
- ADS
- make the users that pay for tokens find a PMF for a product/service and then make the product/service their self
the long tail of chatbot users will never pay for subscriptions, that's been proven since WhatsApp tried to charge a dollar or two per year per user
This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
I miss Google Text ads. I supported AdBlock Plus's decision to exclude them from default filtering. Man, what happened?
Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.
Lots of people take LLM feedback as mostly trustworthy because it doesn't _directly_ try to sell you stuff, yet. Once it gets more in your face, the trust average people place in the quality of answers should see some erosion. In terms of the influence the answers have, this should have a much needed sobering effect.
Let the tiger show it's stripes so that we are reminded what it is actually after.
Doubt this will change the calculus much. Why would I care if GPT puts an ad for medicine in the bottom of a message during a medical conversation? I’d pay big bucks to get medicine without having to talk to a doctor anyways. It’s such a useless part of the process so often.
“Hey doc I need $antidepressentOrWhatever. Been on it for years. Works great.”
“You got it dude.”
Literally every single doctor I’ve ever talked to has this exact same waste of time conversation because they’re too lazy to make it go away.
And the alternative is… an ad for the thing in asking about? For a conversation I had at home, the instant I needed it? What a beautiful tradeoff.
Edit: and this is before even getting into the fact that I get better, more complete advice. Medicine I take, I’ve discovered, has a direct link to another problem I’ve brought up with doctors many times. Never once mentioned to me. Quick Google shows it’s most likely the actual issue. Can’t wait to spend $50 to have a doctor admit he had no idea because he was just prescribing what I told him to without actually applying any of his medical knowledge or training, as is tradition.
Are you saying that your drug has an adverse side effect that has troubled you for a long time? I know!
For what it's worth, it's the pharmacists who have deep knowledge about drug side effects, interactions, and the rest. When your pharmacy offers you a "new drug consult", seize the opportunity. Grill your pharmacist. You can keep coming back. Pharmacists, believe it or not, do not even bill for their consults with customers! You can ask them about drugs literally any time! A very experienced and seasoned pharmacist is your ace in the hole: a valuable asset in the spectrum of health care. This seems like an open secret.
And yes, I can relate: once I filled in a spreadsheet of all the most common drugs I had been prescribed in the past 12 years, along with their most notable adverse effects. And it turned out that many were magnifying, or synergistically enhancing, those adverse effects together. And many effects I did not even want, for starters, and some symptoms that were already present from actual underlying conditions that had gone undiagnosed because the drugs were masking them.
Physicians and prescribers do not care about your side effects. If you complain to your PCP or prescriber about side effects, all they can do is switch you to a different type of drug! That is not productive! The idea is to get educated and to stay informed, and the best route to that is open communication with your pharmacist.
Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." - Sam Altman
I find this -- standard ads -- preferable to insinuating the same thing in the ChatGPT content itself. Although of course they'll do both.
With Chinese models undercutting on price, I feel like they are pretty much forced to do this to reduce the cost to users.
Deeply untrustworthy event.
The profit motive for openAI becomes "attention". (Advert effectiveness is about impressions made to viewers belonging to relevant cohorts, under the presumption the relevant ad will receive more viewer attention, and "perform" better.)
Previously it was "correctness" , I assume.
Their monetization compromises their product.
I just clicked on an ad in ChatGPT mobile app.
As per the press release, it opens up a screen which takes up 90% showing the new site.
It's not a good browsing experience, as it's not a 100% full screen so smaller on an already small phone screen. Couldn't see a 'open in browser' option.
I wish there were a way to universally ban these embedded browser flows. Aside from oauth they serve no use to the end user and are primarily designed to inflate company engagement numbers. Nearly every time I end up in one and forget to click through to browser I regret it.
Apple, why do you allow companies to abuse your customers like this?
I don't understand how this will interact with llms.txt files (or if it does/will)
Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?
I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.
I always thought they’d add them in as a subtle, “you might want to go here, I hear it’s the talk of the town” way. Without disclosing it, then getting around the advertising laws by claiming it was for the vibes, then be in lawsuits that will be compared to Facebook’s privacy lawsuits.
Imagine the backlash. They first need to test the waters with regular and slowly creep in the more “advanced” ads. And probably this will be backdoor deals to have plausible deniability. Coke and big brands will do these deals on an annual basis to slowly influence public opinion.
I’m waiting for the branded ad commits too with codex: “fix: typo in login form (don’t forget to buy a coke to recharge)”.
I will not give them permission to store data about me, personally.
So how can they target me specifically?
Unless of course they do not honor the agreement...
For me it's also not a problem. An ad is easily spottable, because an ad tries to make you buy something.
I still find it funny. Looks like one of the last straws to pull...
My ironic humour hopes https://www.roba-kids.com/en/collections/sandpit appears as an advert with them.
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
Why would people still use ChatGPT?
It's barely free, not that reliable, not the most trustworthy, and now they are popping ads right on my face.
Either spending a good money on the best one, or using the open source models seem to be the future.
Looks like you're out of tokens. Please drink a verification can.
Ah –– Delicious. What can I help you with today? Would you like me to help you find a new car? I can book a test drive of the new Mercedes C class at Prestige Motors 4pm tomorrow.
They heavily boosted the amount of users in the past months (I myself got a business account because they had $1k free credits, and a personal one because of all the resets they give).
Now they are trying to quickly boost revenue with ads.
Next, IPO?
“ Go beyond keywords with richer context signals”; hint: we know everything about our users
Being an early adopter to something like this as an advertiser can probably make you a lot of money.
Reminds me back in 2006 when we were running MySpace layout websites and making almost $100,000 a month from Google and Yahoo ads as teenagers.
Can’t wait to dropship my cat lover shirts from China using chatgpt ads.
It’s like 2015 facebook again.
As someone who is struggling with SEO for my business due to AI in the last 1-2 years, I'm quite displeased to see this. I'm sure this is going to ruin website SEO even more than it already has been.
In my fever dream, my hope is that AI indeed will kill SEO and Page Rank search in general and send those of us who still want to visit webpages back to directories. SEO killed the old web AFAIC. Going back to vetted directories of actually useful and serious sites would be lovely.
A boy can dream.
This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
Open models are the only hope, I guess.
I dont see a problem its just a small suggestion at the bottom and im sure some hacker will make a chrome extension that blocks it.
Ill get worried once I start getting 1 minute ads every 30 responses like Youtube
There is no way a company makes money doing a thing and doesn’t “optimize” it over time to enshittify to the greatest extent possible.
At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?
Interesting, that was expected to happen at some point.
I didn't see any mention of prices, click rates, conversion rates compared to other type of ads, like search ads.
I assume it's going to be bidding based too?
I'm kind of surprised how bare bones the ad manager is.
ANTHROPIC! Learn from their stupid mistake and never insert ads into your models.
Also, this looks like a last-ditch effort to grab as much as they can before they get crushed by the open models and Anthropic.
Funny how none of their testimonials/case studies state any ROI. I'd guess it's because it isn't too strong at this point.
But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.
https://huggingface.co/TheDrummer/Rivermind-12B-v1
I don't see how this can be any worse than normal ads. Much like how Truman finds his wife Meryl odd with her strange injections of products, the ads will become obnoxious and opaque as well. Another example is how YouTubers often embed their ads into the videos themselves, which routinely gets skipped by users as second nature (check the "most played section" on timeline to see bumps where ads end).
If I ask for deep research on which running shoes to get, it's the comparison of products I'm after. Why is A better than B, etc? I don't see how adds could come into that scope either, unless ChatGPT somehow is lying (which would make me swap to a better non-hallucinating model).
If I ask "who is the most influential Swedish poet" and ChatGPT starts blabbering about some book-company who sells books from that author: okay, maybe I do want to buy it.
So: what's the problem?
God damn it. Local models can't become viable soon enough.
Glad I made the right decision divesting from ChatGPT + OpenAI.
I wonder if this is a response to the dawning realization by all the mega rich AI Lab bagholders that these companies might not be as profitable as they want.
I think at some point we have to give up the “we are creating AGI” and admit it was “a better search engine than Google, we can cash grab their ad revenue”
Not new. At least a month old.
Related from April:
Ads in ChatGPT FAQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716063
Their cookies consent is not clickable on Firefox. What a s*t show. Every single privacy-related promise from OpenAI is theatre.
Just in time for the US election season to ramp up. Everyone seems focused on products but what about when the ads are for pushing ideas and ideals?
Well hopefully we will see the LLMs come up with some epic segues from responses into ads. I foresee a new Reddit channel.
Isn't this going to materially impact the quality of the AI response if it has to take into account paid advertising? :(
"Remember When" is the lowest form of conversation. "Let's sell some Ads" is the lowest form of monetization.
But of course everyone believed that this time, this time a corporation would behave differently?
Ouch. OpenAI is giving up. I guess the next step is to be bought by IBM and then sold to Computer Associates.
It's funny how much they just couldn't resist their inextinguishable thirst for money.
"relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience"
They took that from Google!
Aka acceptable ads.
Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.
If the output of an LLM can be influenced by the highest bidders, it’s no longer useful to me.
We've tried them. So far quite expensive with not much return. This channel might not work as well as search.
Would be interested to hear how much you were paying per click, if you feel like sharing.
I have absolutely no relationship with OpenAI but maybe give it some time before drawing such a conclusion.
Perhaps you are right. We've only been using them for two weeks.
Click prices are only ever likely to rise.
Isn't this "model suicide"? The Chinese models will not be doing this.
Adblocker for chatgpt in 3, 2, 1...
So guess OpenAI is unable to run millions of agents and take over the world.
And ads it is
Best not buy the IPO shares I think
For advertisers, did anyone try it? Does it get installs? Cheap or expensive?
How long until purchasing from an AI ad gives you token credits I wonder.
Err would the worlds most dangerous AI model really need advertising?
I never thought it would actually come to this, but here we are.
And the chat results will not be influenced by advertisers (right!)
Software Engineers are the most evil group of people in the world. No other tech industry has this much of disregard to people. So many of today's problems are because of evil people in software. Power corrupt people or corrupt people seek power?
The most evil? Really?
Welp, that's one less competitor in the AI race I guess!
And so begins the enshittification.
I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.
Indeed - the enshittification of the enshittification!
This will definitely not break the model's impartiality at all!
I don't mind it if they bring me a top-notch model for free
If ads are integrated deeply into the responses, the model ceases to be a good model. It will adjust its output to best serve an ad, not best serve the user.
Who would use a chatgpt ad blocking chrome extension if i made one?
I give it less than a year before the ad is at the top.
And two years before it's just silently plugging the product. And it will be considered "increased brand exposure", not ads...
It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already
Just upgraded to their 100$ plans. Time to reconsider.
Oh god guys let me make your ads product for you
>with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience
Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.
I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.
Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.
Well, the code for the ad engine was 100% from codex, so "it can make mistakes", but who doesn't ?
Honestly? About time.
This will help subsidise the cost of tokens leading to a cheaper experience for me (a consumer). Adblockers will come out for those in the know, and ChatGPT are not blending the advertisements WITH the answers.
Anybody getting angry by this clearly has never been in business because this is just par for the course.
their competition is not google.
but amazon. anything that has to do with buying has mostly been captured by amazon.
but will see what the future holds.
Turns out, attention is all you need.
I feel like I've seen this movie.
Black Mirror, Black Mirror, just watch
How unfortunate - I’d rather work with a lesser model than put up with bullshit ads
I finally freed myself from Google using Kagi instead
I don’t currently use OpenAI but if Claude pulls this shit too I’ll have a problem on my hands
Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
Yeah, that ought to boost the IPO.
Not available in Spain yet.
It is about the time
It begins.
This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?
This is so dumb it's hard to grasp. The market is wide open for a consumer first model. Maybe Apple will step into the breach.
Will you trust OpenAI to provide information contradictory to advertisers about drug side effects?
Will you trust OpenAI to explain your rights when dealing with insurance companies?
I could think of more examples, but imagine when Amazon gets a hold of this. Ads are just a terrible bad terrible idea.
Local or you are the product (unless you are insane enough to pay api rates)
Why would local be cheaper than api rates?
Slippery slope ...
How long until advertisement impacts chatgpt answer, I mean not just adding a sponsored link at the end but changing it's answer.
We've seen it with Google, money is too hard to resist. Enshitification is coming !
Thanks god for the open Chinese models, they are the future. All hail the CCP.
"Consumers are increasingly turning to platforms like ChatGPT to research and make decisions because traditional searches have been ruined by advertising, so it’s important that we show up to ruin those moments as well"
I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:
- financial anxiety + kelshi
- random cooking question + galaxy gas
- suicidal thoughts + shotgun
The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
Here's the content rules https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies, specifically in gambling:
> Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
> Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.
Hmmmm, the "digital games" seems suspect
What I get from your two excerpts is that prediction engines, which provide liquidity to a truth-finding market by offering an incentive for inside knowledge to be revealed, are a totally fine and accepted use case I guess?
As a reminder we were talking about Kalshi. I have no idea why you're making this connection with "gambling"!
Aaaand... it's not available in your country. Only available in: Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States.
Which accounts to approximately 8.02% of the global population. Or 37.9% of world nominal GDP. Based on ChatGPT.
Model steering?
It is impossible to overstate how utterly horrible and dystopian this is. I have not been one to reject AI, but they seem hell-bent on driving me to that conclusion.
Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
So the ads are going to stay separate from the chat itself... For now ;) then they'll start playing by Google's playbook
Mark your calendar. When the next generation asks, you can tell them it was today when the AI enshittification era truly began.
It began when they added ?utm=chatgpt to their links, it's been a while, we've seen it coming.
Now you’re the product three times: you pay, they steal your dada, they show you ads. Have to make money somehow
"Wait you mean the shareholders expected us to return back the money and also more money on top"?
wut da actual fuq?!
Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.
is this news?
ChatGPT has replaced 90% of Google for me ... that is another 1T source of income for OpenAI
The enshittification begins.
Cool, so now that open weight models are closing in on SOTA, SOTA enshittifies.
Now for the crash
is it new?
Welp, back to enshitification as much as possible.
great
This is the beginning of the end for the bubble.
Coming soon: advertise in local event slop posters!
Next up: upgrade to Pro to disable memory.
Is this a new record for enshittification?
Here comes the enshittification
Very disappointed openai
Fuck off
Is Kagi still using Russian government owned tech (Yandex) that censors informations about the illegal Ukraine war crimes ?
If so, even if I do agree with your claims about the need to avoid ads so that the user is not the product, I believe there's a double standard in action here.
I really liked the product before having to cancel my subscription for this reason.
Now I'm stuck with boring Qwant and Ecosia...
Well hopefully Oursie.com based on Staan with a subscription system will be a good alternative soon.
As a Ukrainian user of Kagi, their partnership with Yandex is unfortunate, since they are indirectly funding the war, but at the same time I can totally see why it makes sense for the service they're providing
With a service like that you want as much diversification as possible, since western search engines can get heavily censored too. Even if they aren't as censored right now, this might change at any moment with us not even noticing it
For example, right now Yandex tends to be much more lenient to piracy, since it's basically legal in Russia
> For example, right now Yandex tends to be much more lenient to piracy, since it's basically legal in Russia
Likely because most of the pirated content is western and therefor both inconsequential and a way to thumb their noses at the "west."
Yandex is only for image search. Implementing a "I don't want to fund Yandex" option would solve the problem for customers trying not to fund this war.
This would even lower the cost of the user's actions.
Not doing so is a strong take.
EU countries are also funding the war. Which EU-hosted services could we make optional in Kagi, if any?
You mean funding the war to repel the clear, unambiguous aggressor ? Yes.
I agree whole heatedly with severing ties with Yandex, but no, Europe still continues to funnel billions of Euros to Russia; €5.57B in goods (plus €7.81B in exports) and €3.63B in energy[0] in Q1 2026.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Make no mistake, western search is censored probably more so than eastern search.
*EDIT* All you need to do is look at how DMCA is handled… TikTok… Instagram… Facebook… Google…
[flagged]
I don't understand your question. The person you replied to never said anything about a boycott. They said that diversification is kind of necessary, so to use both Russian and American services, as both sides do censor/block different things.
Well that's what Kagi does for you.
'Google Is Censoring Reviews of ICE Detention Centers' - https://theintercept.com/2026/07/20/google-maps-reviews-ice-...
Yes, I have de-googled to the extent possible. I haven't used it for search in more than 3 years, I'm off all of their cloud products including gmail, and I don't use them for auth whenever possible. I'm 100% sure I've missed plenty, but I have to do SOMETHING about Techno-Feudal-Fascism.
This is not the gotcha you people think it is. Browsing HN does not put money in the pockets of the US government. Lost of people the world over avoid US products and services if they can. The jingoism of the US is well known.
Do you use Google? Any Microsoft products? Any Apple products? Any non-Russian computing device?
what’s your point? i boycott russian companies, not american
if you don’t see the difference that’s on you
ok i admitted it, now call me a hypocrite
The relevant difference between Russia and America seems to be - that Russia is killing less people? Or is there another thing that makes the difference for you?
> that censors informations about the illegal Ukraine war crimes
If your concern is specifically about the censorship, then it's not an issue with Kagi, since Yandex is used as one of many sources (and mainly for images afaik)
They should simply stop using any russian tech at this time.
Should they also stop using American tech because of the vast list of American war crimes?
Well there are millions of European trying to avoid US tech. It's hard. A lot harder than Russian tech.
As for the comparison, I don't think it's fair. The US has not yet invaded its neighbor, Canada, leading to millions of deaths and heavy casualties. Let's not adopt your binary view on this matter.
So it's ok if they invade far-away countries, napalm bomb them leading to millions of casualties, but not ok to invade neighboring countries?
The US is responsible for far more pain and suffering in my nock of the world, so it's funny when Americans act like they have some sort of moral high ground.
Whoa! You don't know where they are from. Given time zones, it's likely they are from Europe
Or very far eastern Canada :D
The US has at least led the longest window of relative peace in the world. Might seem worse or the same to you if you're in one of the flashpoints, but for Europeans they've been reasonable hegemons until recently.
Russia has no such redeeming qualities, as far as I can tell they've always been extractive expansionist assholes like all previous empires. The only reason you might not despise them is that they might not be active in your area, as their ability to project force has always been pathetic. In Eastern Europe they're roughly Satan, and have been for at least a century.
>As for the comparison, I don't think it's fair. The US has not yet invaded its neighbor, Canada, leading to millions of deaths and heavy casualties. Let's not adopt your binary view on this matter.
No, just bombed, invaded, overthrew governments, etc in dozens of countries all around the world...
Yet not annexed anyone so far (seems like US today is another case).
Given that we talk about mostly white European settlers, just the huge majority of native american lands, a good chunk of Mexico, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and several smaller places, areas controlled as "banana republics", Phillipines, and who knows, eventually Greenland, and even talk about Canada, unserious as it likely is.
And with no own ethnic population there to begin with or continuous historical ties to the area.
The US invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Syria, Latin America etc.
The list is too long. So here's a link showing the list of invasions, bombings, and CIA-backed regime-change operations in other countries:
https://www.davemanuel.com/us-military-interventions-invasio...
The estimates are that the US has killed between 20 and 30 million people after WWII.
And these are just direct kills. The figure is much higher if you count indirect kills through means of economic sanctions.
Yes, I know, didn't you read the "Well there are millions of European trying to avoid US tech. It's hard. A lot harder than Russian tech." sentence above ?
You're comparing a war currently being played by Russia, destroying their own country by the way, to past wars.
I'm not saying the US didn't trigger wars and their casualties. It's of course true.
> You're comparing a war currently being played by Russia, destroying their own country by the way, to past wars.
During the past year and a half, the US has bombed Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Yemen and Mexico. It has provided free bombs to a country that has been bombing Palestine (genocide), Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
It has kidnapped the leader of a country and assassinated the leader of another country.
It has pirated all oil shipments to Cuba, causing a severe crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_fuel_blocka...
Avoiding Russian tech, specifically Yandex, is also hard because Yandex is one of only three search indexes that aren't corrupted to all hell with business interests. The other ones being Marginalia and Mojeek. Of those, it's the only one that has image search.
They have only threatened to do that, yes
Indeed, the comparison isnt fair. The US is complicit in a genocide recognised by the UN and many of the US's own allies.
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I mean yes, there's an enormous movement to diversify away from american tech currently in the EU, and a massive amount of investment to get away from the entire american tech bubble
I have no idea why you're phrasing this like this when so much money is being put into solving precisely this problem right now
> have no idea why you're phrasing this like this
Because Kagi is in California.
Do we live in Ecotopia ? Did I miss the news ? Hopefully yes.
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Impeccable argument.
Wouldn't that be censorship, too?
You’re not allowed to ask that question.
For what reason? It's a source, not THE source
Have you followed the news?
How the US is attempting to flatten Iran and everyone is boycotting US products?
Maybe we are getting wiser to 'country bogeymen bad' stories and realizing that only bad people do bad things.
Why are you trying to divert the topic?
You don't think the genocide in Ukraine has enough scale of a tragedy, with more than 2 million casualties since 2022? Isn't this enough to flag a product?
The Ukrainians posed no threat to anyone, they didn't have a nuclear program, in fact they surrendered the third largest nuclear stockpile and one of the signatures of the memorandum is trying to delete Ukraine.
Why are you trying to dilute this event which is directly related to the topic?
Is it to try to normalize the crime of genocide in Ukraine?
Because your argument suffers the fallacy of proving too much. You're trying to say that all Russian technology must be boycotted because it does a war, but your argument also says American technology must be boycotted, Chinese technology must be boycotted and European technology must be boycotted. No transistors for anyone who subscribes to your argument!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5eMM3Wp3hbCuKKPE/proving-to...
No, it's simpler than that - there's an ongoing genocide in Ukraine, a country that was at peace and posed threat to no one.
The guys that surrendered their nukes in exchange for security, right?
What I'm saying is that anything that helps prolong this war should be avoided.
It's not a fallacy, it's actually common sense.
You're again trying to dilute the genocide by bringing USA, China, etc.
So why are you trying to normalize one event, by diluting it among other events that have no relationship whatsoever with it?
Why is the Ukraine war the only war that matters? Shouldn't we also stop helping prolong the Iran war? I'm not diluting one event - I'm saying we need to care about all wars.
>Why is the Ukraine war the only war that matters? Shouldn't we also stop helping prolong the Iran war? I'm not diluting one event - I'm saying we need to care about all wars.
Nicely stated.
It matters within the context of this comment thread about a company using assets from specific state commiting genocide that had caused more than 2 million casualties in 4 years.
We're talking about cities razed to the ground, more than a thousand medical facilities destroyed, and of course the systematic and deliberate attempt destruction of a culture - just because they wanted to be a sovereign democracy.
I don't know if you wrote this comment about the US or Russia, which proves my point.
> No, it's simpler than that - there's an ongoing genocide in Ukraine, a country that was at peace and posed threat to no one.
Cherry picking the facts or blinded by your own beliefs? There was conflict for years prior to the announcement of Russia's involvement on the world stage[0].
0 https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-c...
Stop using all Russian tech for the illegal Ukraine invasion, stop using all American tech for using the illegal Iran war, stop using all Chinese tech for the Uyghur genocide, stop using all Arabian tech for their modern-day slavery, stop using all (most?) European tech for their direct support of the Palestinian Genocide...
Very few acceptable countries left, it seems. Canada, maybe?
Canada, those oppressors of the natives?
I don't really see any difference between this and the vast amounts of of Alaska pollock or cod that is imported from Russia.
The difference is information manipulation, like misinformation.
While there should be a complete sanction of Russian products, cod is cod, it's a consumable that has to follow public health standards.
There's no such thing for information, and for many years the Russian state has been trying hard at it.
Yes, because that never happens in America. Only Russia does that. No one else.
Well the last time the US committed genocide of a culture was way before any tech company was founded, while Russia is doing it since 2022 - by their own admission.
If we count of course the illegal annexation of territory, one of the most egregious crimes against sovereignty, it's been doing it since the occupation of Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine in 2014, you get the idea.
What I don't understand is why you're trying to divert the attention to the US, the topic regarding the current crimes against humanity and war crimes of Russia have enough merits to be a topic on its own.
I think you need to research US foreign policy. They are literally trying to do that with Iran. They helped Israel do it to the Palestinians. Not to take away from the Ukraine atrocities but US is just as bad as Russia.
> "not trying to take away from Ukraine atrocities but making an effort to try to take away from Ukraine atrocities"
Right.
What a strawman
The strawman of someone telling to do research of the US commiting genocide in Iran?
It's not a serious comment, again trying to split the topic.
The US is trying to commit genocide of at least two cultures literally right now.
I stopped using Kagi news when I saw it has Russia Today as a source for many articles
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Well Russia Today isn't really a news source. It's more of a propaganda outlet. But so are most of the sources that we call news, anyway. Maybe if high quality news sources existed, Kagi could uprank them, but they don't.
This isn't similar to the Yandex situation because Yandex actually returns good results and Russia Today is garbage.
Where is the dehumanisation in “I stopped using this because it makes extensive use of a source I consider untrustworthy”? That seems like quite a leap.
Yes it is a good thing to actively avoid information warfare by adversarial government entity. Its like not wanting literal feces in my food sources.
I say that roysting is eating live kittens. It must be true because a source posted that information
1. Yandex is dutch controlled, the russia-related business got sold in 2024 to Russian investors.
2. Yandex was never owned by the Russian government, albeit government-related censorship happened (but so does on Twitter/Google/Meta etc as they all have to comply with local laws where they operate).
3. Kagi answers questions about Russian war crimes. You can try yourself [1]
4. There's no such thing as a legal war, the closest is a UN sanctioned peacekeeping operation.
[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=what+war+crimes+did+russia+commit+...
this is absolutely not true. yandex IS the russia-related business that got sold in 2024, the dutch entity (now known as "nebius group") is basically just data centers now.
This is naive on so many levels. Yandex is Russian government. You can't take a shit without KGB in Russia.
Only the Russian business is in hands of Russian investors since 2024.
And again, you can check that Kagi answers any query about Russia yourself.
enrico, at this point you're knowingly spreading misinformation. I corrected you in my last comment: the yandex search index is owned by the russian entity. there is no non-russian "yandex" anymore, period.
> After a short transition period following completion, YNV will cease to use the Yandex brand, which will be retained by the Target group. We expect that our International Businesses will develop their own branding going forward. We intend to seek shareholder approval to change the legal name of YNV in due course.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1513845/000151384524...
Not the OP, but I think 'illegal' was for 'war crimes', not 'war'.
Yes of course, "independant" investors that would jump by the broken window by themselves if they did criticize the Kremlin.
Yandex is russian controlled. Everything Yandex related was sold to russians
Google is US controlled. Not really seeing the difference.
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Kagi is directly funding Yandex by sending search traffic to it, which then in turn funds the Russian state and war.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=kagi+yand...
The guy who started it has previously been here on HN defending Kagi's business with Yandex, and personally I think his arguments are BS. Yandex does not add any special feature or functionality that is so great they should make it obligatory to include as a default option.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44596341
Is it? I can't find an official source that supports that claim. Also, Yandex disinvested from Russia and split the non-Russian business into a different company. So is it Yandex or "Yandex (copy)"?
I'm not trying to defend / take a position. I just find it difficult to reason without having an official (up-to-date) source.
Trying to say that Yandex isn't a Russian company is preposterous. It's the largest search engine in Russia and runs tons of other online services that are analogous to social media and cloud things in the English and Western European language speaking world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex
they're conflating yandex with the international entity that sold it off to russian investors (now known as "nebius group"). the entire basis of the argument is wrong.
It is https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
no it didn't. the international entity sold off the vast majority of yandex businesses and assets to russian investors, then rebranded to "nebius group". that is to say that the yandex index/api used by kagi is wholly russian-owned and has essentially doubled down on russia/its allies.
if you're curious, the dominant business retained by the international entity was their data center stuff (though yandex still operates its own cloud business in russia/elsewhere).
The non-Russian portion of the company doesn't include the search engine technology.
I wish I could say that funding the US or Israel or China was better. It's not all equivalent, but pretty much every major country is supporting atrocities in one way or another, today.
I feel like the advantages of cultural exchange outweights the drawbacks. Boycottes should be on the margin or they are counterproductive and bellicose.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but I think this comment
> Yandex does not add any special feature or functionality that is so great they should make it obligatory to include as a default option.
kind of captures kagi's argument: that its removal would degrade search results in a not-immediately-noticeable way, particularly for certain areas of the world, which might actually be worse than a loss of a distinct add-on feature or something.
...but yeah, from my perspective, it'd be great if you could turn it off.
is this a joke? namecheap did years ago the brave move by suspending services to russian customers. why should we support a company that seems involved in russian war affairs?
Unfortunately it appears to not be a joke, my best theory is that either the persons running it have sympathies with Russia and their war efforts, or they value the marginal gain in revenue from having Yandex integrated in some sort of ultra cut throat free market capitalism approach with no qualms or concerns about anything ethical or moral.
What about the US-initiated war in Iran?
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Consider that perhaps the person you're responding to really does treat Russian and the US equally... by continuing to import goods from both, and use technology or services from both countries.
Many people in Europe eat Russian fish, warm their houses with Russian natural gas, use American SaaS, and fill their houses with goods made in China.
That doesn't mean they support everything those countries do.
It does mean their solution for nation-state level conflicts isn't a total embargo of the country.
I would suggest that you ask a Ukrainian for their opinion on the matter, and take a good listen to what they have to say.
And maybe we also ask an Iranian while we are at it...
The market does not ask the ones being crushed between capital interests for feedback.
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The two comments above mine is a clear example on how mob mentality works. Albeit an impotent mob rage among anonymous internet commentators, but the exact same mentality that IRL usually escalates into violence and later into the killing of a designated victim(s).
Lies and accusations get enforced and exaggerated at every step. From purchasing services from a Russian IT company -> " involved in russian war affairs" -> "the persons running it have sympathies with Russia and their war efforts".
I really thought Europeans got this kind of mentality out of their system in the 20th century, but it's alive and well still. And there will be innocent people killed as a consequence. And people here on HN will celebrate and rejoice in that. They know they are on "the right side", and therefore have the right to do anything to anyone. Just like Mr Putin might think over on his side.
Trust me, if you've ever been to Germany and paid any attention to their politics, you'll realize they haven't learned anything from the last century.
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I don’t know if your claims are true, misinformed, rumors.
On the censor bit all companies operate within the law of the country they are in .
They have been confirmed by the CEO of Kagi and its docs. https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
> On the censor bit all companies operate within the law of the country they are in .
Yes, that's why I don't want my money poured from Kagi to Yandex, a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its neighbour and doing war crimes.
Do you instead, want it poured to companies in the US, A country that invades other countries and bombs schools and hospitals? And is currently supporting another country ALSO engaging in war crimes abd headed by an internationally wanted criminal?
> Yes, that's why I don't want my money poured to a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its neighbour and doing war crimes.
What makes you think Kagi is owned by the Russian state? Should we cancel all US services because the US government started the Iran war for no reason?
They obviously meant Yandex
Kagi is also a company owned by the state of a country that invaded its non-neighbor and does war crimes. So is Google. Is it only bad if the countries are neighbors, or what?
Sure but whatever company you pay for in any industry will do as they are legally told eventually
Goes to the spyware in your tv to the trackers cameras in your EV
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They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
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The same people that ruined Meta are now the same people at OpenAI are going to place ads there.
This surely is saving the world and benefiting humanity. /s
But almost certainly someone somewhere is building an ad-blocker to rid of the ads. We'll see.
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This is just a big whataboustim attempt.
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The US bombed a school? Where's the worldwide outrage in reaction to Russia destroying HUNDREDS of them in Ukraine? While everyone is hyperfixated on the US, Russia has deliberately targeted schools, hospitals, kindergartens, supermarkets, apartment buildings and far more in targeted terror campaigns. And yet all is silent in the West, in fact every attempt to bring up the evil of Russia is immediately drowned out by BUT WHAT ABOUT. Every single time. It's because this isn't really about schools. This just lets people quietly signal their support for Russia for them standing up to 'the West' by murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Whatever evil the US has committed in the past and is supporting now, Russia has done tenfold in just this war. The list of kidnappings, plundering, torture and rape that they've committed is practically endless. They have no mercy, but many Westerners have had their brains melted by east-vs-west 'discourse' and they won't ever understand.
Bro, it sounds like you have some deep-seated religious hatred in you.
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Why are you making an effort to split the conversation away from the matter at hand?
Isn't the genocide of Ukraine enough of a subject? Because this is a typical pattern.
Stay focused on the subject, the false emotional reply doesn't stick here.
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very cool
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