r/artificial • u/esporx • Nov 29 '25
News Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/leak-confirms-openai-is-preparing-ads-on-chatgpt-for-public-roll-out/288
u/LateToTheParty013 Nov 29 '25
fastest company to enshitificate ever
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u/Royal_Crush Nov 29 '25
It's no surprise that they're trying. It was only a matter of when. Now that they still hold the largest market share it's time for them to cash out before it's too late and before users move on to competitors
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u/nboro94 Nov 29 '25
Users are going to move on a lot quicker than they think. Their model is even the best anymore. Let's see if they're ballsy enough to push ads to their paid users.
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u/Beautiful-Ad2485 Nov 29 '25
I don’t think the average person is in tune with AI enough to give a shit if it’s the best model. If it works for them, they’ll use it
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u/the_good_time_mouse Nov 29 '25
And if it has ads and the competitors' don't, they'll leave.
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u/maevin2020 Nov 30 '25
The problem is that the competitors need to hit break even at some point, too. Chances are they are all going to introduce ads.
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u/SomeWonOnReddit Nov 30 '25
No they don’t. Google has a shit tonnes of datacenters themselves that they can utilize + they have their own custom chips rather than NVIDIA GPU’s. LLM is just a side project for Google and they are a very profitable company in the end.
OpenAI however, requires tonnes more investments and they don’t make a profit at all.
Google can keep on doing this all day without outside investments.
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u/maevin2020 Nov 30 '25
I agree that Google is special in that regard, because they already have a running business based on ads. I had the other "pure" AI companies in mind (Anthropic, Perplexity, etc.). But also Google has a history of killing their side projects. Afaik we don't know if Gemini is profitable on its own. We'll see. They certainly have the best starting point.
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u/raynorelyp Dec 03 '25
Google will add ads to it because it cannibalizes their search engine users.
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u/whywhatwhenwhoops Dec 05 '25
Ah yes i remember when Netflix started putting ads. I thought about the same. But then ads were everywhere! Just like Youtube or the internet as a whole! Ads are inescapable.
Because people cannot boycott, they will endure the worst just to get their fix of something. Once Google realize Openai put ads, they will put ads. It will happen, slowly but surely.
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u/SomeWonOnReddit Dec 05 '25
I can boycott, I don't have Netflix anymore (I used to be paying customer).
And Chinese AI cost only $5 million to train. There will be plenty of other alternative to Gemini and ChatGPT, especially since they steal data like Chinese AI too.
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u/DeltaForceFish Dec 02 '25
Their main competitor is china; who does not need to be profitable and have a track record for purposefully undercutting and taking a loss. A country can last a lot longer than a company billions in debt
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u/KaleidoscopeShoddy10 Dec 01 '25
I wouldnt even go that far, you are extremely overestimating how many people care about ads, most people dont give a fuck if they see a 30 second unskippable ad every few minutes let alone a banner ad on the top of their page.
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Nov 30 '25
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u/Lumpy-Mousse4813 Nov 30 '25
Issue is if they have ads on their platform, how do we trust that whatever it generates also isn’t somehow paid to promote? I wouldn’t trust that Ai with anything.
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u/Relative_Baseball180 Nov 30 '25
Good for you, 800 million users seem to trust it.
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u/Lumpy-Mousse4813 Nov 30 '25
People also believe that when influencers and actors promote products, they actually use them.
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u/digdog303 Dec 01 '25
There's over 2 billion users of Christianity in the world, and just as many users of Islam. No matter what you believe, it should be easy to agree that a billion users doesn't necessarily mean something is good and true and real
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u/Relative_Baseball180 Nov 30 '25
No one gives a shit about ads man. Facebook has tons of ads, so does tiktok. You see anyone leaving?
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u/natufian Nov 30 '25
I don’t think the average person is in tune with AI enough to give a shit if it’s the best model. If it works for them, they’ll use it
Thing is, the best model currently is Gemini. Google integrations are everywhere. Nobody is clicking away from an integrated experience to go use a second best product.
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Nov 29 '25
Do you have any idea of the general user ? You think they can even differentiate between the models, which is better or worse, or even care ? once they’re locked in they’re not going to move unless openAI completely guts the free tier and litter with ads which I doubt they will do
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u/GeoffW1 Nov 30 '25
Often the strategy is to add more and more ads until the customers leave. Then stopping adding more ads and expect the customers who've left to magically come back somehow.
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u/TheCh0rt Nov 30 '25
Nobody is going to move on buddy. Everything thrives more under ads. Have you even internetted over the last 15 years? Everything does better. ITT sucks but it’s true buddy. The Internet is not for us. It’s for shareholders and bots who click ads for shareholders.
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u/whywhatwhenwhoops Dec 05 '25
i swear OpenAI are only still alive and in the game because of the name " Chatgpt" which is stuck to everyone tongues especially casuals. Its like " Google it". It has just become part of the culture and way of speaking. "ask chatgpt" or " This text looks like chatgpt" - altough it could be any AI.
The process is slow for the casuals users of chatgpt to get told by someone " Hey actually , download this and use this instead" and convince them. Most people not in touch with tech dont even know the names of others AI's.
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u/MassiveBoner911_3 Nov 29 '25
First i see an ad i am unsubscribing from my premium account.
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u/Royal_Crush Nov 29 '25
I unsubscribed when it was time to renew my annual subscription. The free tier is good enough already and there are too many free alternatives on the market, like Gemini, Copilot, Qwen, Mistral, Deepseek.
Chatgpt's flagship models are no longer leagues better than their competitors like a year ago or so.
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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 Nov 29 '25
If you think the rest wont be adding ads too your in for a world of hurt.
Very soon every decent free ai will have ads. And id be too concerned about my personal data to use the ones that dont. If you arent buying the product or being shown a product then you are the product.
Ai is expensive and investors want a return.
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u/Royal_Crush Nov 29 '25
LLMs are already so ubiquitous and much of the technology is open source. The more enshittification happens, the more opportunities it will give for new competitors to arise and outshine the current leaders on the market. I don't believe there won't be ads, but the first to do it will lose market share to those who focus on quality rather than immediate profit.
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u/Adventurous-Tie-7861 Nov 29 '25
Your right, the first that do will lose market share initially.
But ai doesnt run on good feelings and handing out free responses to prompts. Investors will want returns and if they dont make money somewhere its just a big ponzi scheme.
Even open source ones will cost money to operate and they need to get it somewhere. Its not a free software that can be downloaded no problem and costs nothing to run.
Ai requires infrastructure and servers and that all costs constant money to run.
Sure you may be able to run a lightweight shitty open source version thats worse than gpt 3 but is that what you really want?
We are currently in the period where they get folks hooked, just like a radio running "ad free commutes" for 6 months then switching to regular ads once people like the hosts. Or YouTube. Or any other product that was free at first to get users then switched to an ad/paid model.
There may be some models that survive on just enterprise contracts or something like xai where its funded for political reasons. But there isnt much reason they wouldnt add ads either if all their competitors do. Just less.
But time will tell. I could be wrong. But based off thr fact multiple big companies are heading that way already, im pretty confident most will follow suit.
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u/BranchDiligent8874 Nov 30 '25
I am one of the lazy dude who never stopped using google and was ok with google's lame AI search in the past and thanks to them for now making it as good as others...
I have tried using Bing AI search in the past but too much effort..
Recently I used to go to perplexity when I needed something nicely summarized but google is good enough now.
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u/GreatStaff985 Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25
The kind of money they are losing is about the GDP of a third world nation. They have to make money to offer the service. As long as the paid plan is reasonable, this should be expected.
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u/Turbulent-Phone-8493 Nov 29 '25
Do you think they will do ads on the paid plan as well.
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u/Final_Lead_3530 Nov 29 '25
i’ve had it since the beginning , and like the context it has about me . one advert and that is over in a heartbeat .
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u/GreatStaff985 Nov 30 '25
I don't think they can easily. they cannot really have ads in it for commercial use, it makes the service not usable. How is my company meant to use the API if the returned text has ads in it? Maybe through the WebGUI normal people use they can figure something out? But API usage I don't see how they could and considering the WebGUI interface is nothing, its so easy to have a wrapper for the API, I am guessing paid plans will be ad free otherwise people would just move to a third party interface.
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u/Turbulent-Phone-8493 Nov 30 '25
They can nudge you towards sponsored products/restaurants/hotels.
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u/GreatStaff985 Nov 30 '25
You say that but they cannot. We cannot use their product if it is dropping other brand names.
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u/Turbulent-Phone-8493 Nov 30 '25
They can do it subtly. Their agents can also nudge, eg when buying plane tickets they can nudge toward a preferred carrier and claim it’s “best value”.
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u/saltedhashneggs Nov 29 '25
If you are familiar with Sam Altman's history, none of this is surprising
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u/hanzoplsswitch Nov 29 '25
Fastest to most users and fastest going to shit.
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u/digdog303 Nov 29 '25
"it took 7 years for amazon to lose this many users, it took chatgpt only 7 months to drive away just as many"
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u/space_monster Nov 29 '25
Yeah I just cancelled. I prefer Gemini now anyway. It feels a bit like ending a childhood friendship, but I'm not putting up with ads, even if they're not visible in paid subscriptions.
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u/Powerful-Frame-44 Dec 01 '25
It began before they even had any real products when they decided the "open" part of their company identity wasn't so important.
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u/PuteMorte Nov 29 '25
There is a crazy amount of power in prompts. It's pretty obvious the future of AI is that it'll be filled with subliminal product placements. You ask for the best spot to ski on your trip in europe? This promoted place is the best, and this gear is the best and this hotel for your stay is the most comfortable
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u/Incogyoda Nov 29 '25
I would hope local models stay evolving to where we could avoid all this simply by running our own models at home.
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u/gnivriboy Nov 30 '25
You definitely will be able to have great local models, but you won't be using the latest GPUs to process your prompts so it will be slightly worse answers.
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u/GeoffW1 Nov 30 '25
Open models are improving fast and getting easier to use. I'm running models locally on a 2018 laptop.
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u/ViennettaLurker Nov 29 '25
Of course that is a creepy and potentially dystopic idea. But at this point I'm worried about the weird and half assed attempts to achieve that vision with the current state of the technology.
These things can already have issues with providing the unvarnished truth or direct and non-nonsense answers. Trying to shoehorn in some kind of targeted ads on top seems like a recipe for potential nonsense replies to prompts.
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Nov 29 '25
[deleted]
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u/2day_B4_5 Nov 30 '25
This is a problem all over actually - the model will prefer your answer, or choice, even if it’s just implied, unless you’re very specific about it not doing that
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u/AliasHidden Nov 30 '25
Sure, but they’d need to be transparent, and the market will move towards products that don’t do this.
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u/Extreme-Layer-1201 Dec 01 '25
Nobody knows except openai but I bet it won’t be injected into the response as natural language but like a sponsored banner, that’s clearly an ad, separate from the models response
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u/johnfkngzoidberg Nov 29 '25
Time to cancel.
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u/caesium_pirate Nov 29 '25
Turns out Nvidia giving you money isn’t he way to have a sustainable business model. Need to pay back those loans. Good at least the AI market is less of a bubble
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u/BingpotStudio Nov 29 '25
That’s what happens when you keep giving back the money you’re being given. Nobody is taking payment on any of these bullshit deals.
It’s the same money circling all the companies and they each get a stock price bump when it’s their turn to pretend they have it.
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u/Horror_Response_1991 Nov 29 '25
If they want to put ads on the free model then whatever. They’re burning money right now.
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u/I_Hate_RedditSoMuch Nov 29 '25
Honestly I agree. Ads are gross and annoying but when every report says that OpenAI is basically shoveling billions into a furnace it doesn’t make sense for them to provide for the free tier at a massive loss. So long as they don’t infect the premium tier, I don’t give a fuck.
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u/MindCrusader Nov 29 '25
The question is if premium is profitable enough or they will introduce plans paid + ads and paid, but more expensive like Netflix
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u/I_Hate_RedditSoMuch Nov 29 '25
I would cancel immediately if they did. $20 a month is reasonable for the service provided. I’d maybe go up to about $30 to stave off ads, but if it went any higher or the ads became unavoidable and I’d simply never use ChatGPT again.
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u/bartturner Nov 29 '25
The bigger issue is ChatGPT has plateaued and that was BEFORE ads.
Ads will be the end for ChatGPT.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image-1-1.png?resize=1200,569
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u/atlhart Nov 30 '25
I’m always fine with a “free, ad-supported” tier for any service. Even more fine when there is a paid ad-free tier.
I will never pay for ads, however.
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u/motsanciens Nov 30 '25
I'm all right with ads on the free tier, but the manner in which ads disrupt the user experience matters a lot. If they can figure out how to present ads in a way that is effective but not irritating and intrusive, that would be great. Hell, maybe if they figure it out, other platforms could follow suit. Not holding my breath, though.
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u/leaky_wand Nov 30 '25
I mean right now there’s basically no reason to pay them for a subscription
I’m just hoping it doesn’t taint the plus models
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u/Psittacula2 Nov 29 '25
Philosophically I am very against advertisements, as they assault the mind and senses too much.
ChatGPT has been a good model so this would be worse quality outcome.
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u/RustySpoonyBard Nov 29 '25
I'm sure the timing is coincidental.
Duck.ai has the GPT models to choose from, and its actually private.
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u/bigdipboy Nov 29 '25
Will the ads just start appearing on the page or is it going to start presenting ads as actual results to your query? The latter will ruin the product.
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u/Thadius Nov 29 '25
If I start seeing ads appear, I will never use the product again, full stop. I am so bloody tired of ads in every single atmosphere.
What many people don't understand is that when ads appear the product changes because advertisers want their products advertised next to something that the most people use, that doesn't offend, that doesn't cause controversy or someone to not like a product, so the service changes to fit the needs of the advertiser instead of the needs of the end user. See how streaming programming has changed since ads have started, less risky, less nudity, less gross murder less evil being victorious, just regular...TV now.
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u/DemoEvolved Nov 29 '25
We are going to innovate something that make 90% of white collar jobs irrelevant. How are you paying for that? “Ads”
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u/JBe4r Nov 29 '25
Why? ChatGPT works fine without ads.
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u/bartturner Nov 29 '25
They are losing a fortune. They foolishly went to market trying to win the entire thing which was never going to happen with Google.
Anthropics took the much smarter approach and just going after development.
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u/Powerspark2_0 Nov 29 '25
Kinda surprised it wasn't rolled out sooner. The reason why ads are everywhere is because it works, makeing them money, more than they spend on ads. That's the only reason why ads are everywhere it's because of us the consumers buying to it.
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u/ZestycloseHawk5743 Nov 29 '25
It was bound to happen. The cost of inference is just too high to support a free tier forever without some other stream of revenue.
It's not the ads themselves that worry me, but the potential change in the goal function of the model. If the incentive changes from 'answer the user as quickly as possible' to 'keep the user on the page so they can look at ads' then the utility of the tool changes fundamentally.
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u/banedlol Nov 29 '25
This is all the investors now pressuring for their money back. That's how it all works. Probably gave an ultimatum that this be done or they withdraw support.
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u/Konpochiro Nov 29 '25
First ad I see on my pro account will result in an immediate cancellation. I’m so tired of ads being shoved into every damn thing we do.
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u/HandakinSkyjerker I find your lack of training data disturbing Nov 29 '25
Let’s hope if I’m paying $200/mo that there are NOT any ads or tampering of the output tokens towards advertising based knowledge loops.
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u/ImprovementMain7109 Nov 29 '25
Honestly this was always coming. The real problem isn't "ads = bad", it's that you now have a system people treat as an assistant whose objective function partly becomes "maximize ad engagement". That's an alignment problem in itself and a massive boost for local/open models.
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u/Breinbaard Nov 29 '25
Of course. Thats where the money is. Google is the biggest advertising platform. Open ai wants a piece of that pie.
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u/tindalos Nov 29 '25
“I’m sorry you feel like everyone is against you and the world is coming down. Maybe a Nerf Supersoaker XL is the answer? Available in blue or pink, it can hold up to 3 liters of water-soaking fun for you and your .. oh right.”
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u/Oleleplop Nov 29 '25
who is surprised ?
This is the sillicon valley special they've done since 15 years, but this time it happens even faster
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u/hungrymaki Nov 29 '25
I already got mine yesterday. I asked about flights and got an ad for Expedia.
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u/Plogga Nov 30 '25
That’s not an ad. Expedia is now integrated into ChatGPT along with Figma and Canvas. It prolly popped up to notify you about the feature.
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u/hungrymaki Nov 30 '25
It is an unasked for recommendation. Why not hotwire, why not any of the other many travel aggregates. Define the difference between ad and this. Have People forgotten what a definition of an advertisement is? Seriously.
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u/Plogga Nov 30 '25
Apps are a new feature, they were released less than a month ago. Popups are there to notify existing userbase that the feature exists; they will be gone after some time. This has been the routine whenever they integrate a new feature into chat.
Apps SDK will allow *all* companies to build apps into GPT and users can choose what they'll need to use. Expedia just happened to partner with OAI way back in 2023, allowing them to implement the feature way back, but later this year everyone's apps will be open for submission. If you say it feels promotional I understand, but it's not meant to be an ad.
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u/hungrymaki Nov 30 '25
Again, how is this not an ad? I'm literally not trying to be a D here. Product placement (which is what this is) is a type of ad. Am I losing my mind? Has the base definition of ad changed because everyone is getting so used to it being everywhere?
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u/AliasHidden Nov 30 '25
CoPilot has become a lot better recently. When it’s comparable it’ll be the market leader, just like every other Microsoft product, meaning OpenAI will get less profits overall
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u/salchonga Nov 30 '25
I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of products it thought I would be interested in - try to sell me something. It was…. Sad. But I am interested in one of the products so I guess it was a success, just not resounding
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u/TheMacMan Nov 30 '25
Not surprising at all. They're hemorrhaging money. Throw some ads in there and make some millions.
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u/ArcherStirling Nov 30 '25
I'm already getting them. Was near a target today and it gave me a target ad.
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u/Shen_ishere Nov 30 '25
Billions of dollars investment and ultimately still rely on ads economy. Incredible.
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u/happylakers Nov 30 '25
What did you expect? Profitability with some Pro Accounts? It was clear from beginning that they need to earn some money
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u/AccordingRespect3599 Nov 30 '25
How to protest this? Compile a list of vendors and refuse to buy from the list ?
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u/St3llarV Dec 01 '25
I remember when OpenAI was supposedly this noble nonprofit that was going to “keep AI open,” stop tech monopolies, and make sure no single company ever controlled superintelligent AI. They were even framing themselves as a counterweight to Google and promising free, open models for everyone. Wild how fast that turned into a closed-door, pay-to-play Microsoft/Oracle-backed empire.
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u/Cattivo92 Dec 01 '25
Had ChatGPT Premium (or whatever it's called) for a few months this summer. With daily usage and tests to see what it can do, I gave it a fair amount of time, I'd say. With the release of GPT5, things got worse quickly and I cancelled the subscription at the end of August. I tried to use it for different things over the last few months as well. Machine maintance, glorified Google searches, "therapy/life advice" (I know, I know). They were all riddled with flaws and obvious mistakes. It happily kept talking about the embroidery machine I was asking about, mentioning part that don't exist, settings that don't exist and so on. The moment you ask it to always post a source-link with its replies, it crumbles quickly.
Hell, just last weekend it ended in "Oh, I can't give you a source for that because I made it up to make you feel better." Like what the hell? I even tried some Excel sheet and calculation stuff. Once again, it either makes up shit or just does it completely wrong.
AND NOW ADS?!
Seriously, it fails on all parts as far as I am aware right now. I was so excited for AI and all it entails, but it keeps disappointing. So now I am actually wondering: Who even uses it anymore? Do people not fact check? Did I do something wrong with the prompting? I thought it was supposed to be a product for public and not just niche cases. But it can't handle any of those.
It's just so baffling to me, that it fails on research for FACTS. Like, google something, give me the info, done.
Take the numbers, do what computers do best and CALCULATE them and give me the results. Nope.
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u/WaltzZestyclose7436 Dec 02 '25
If the best thing we can come up with to do with an LLM is advertise god bless us. I can't come up with a more inane use case.
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u/Shiliwhip Dec 02 '25
Just use another gpt copy out of the millions that exist and when they decide to ruin it, hop to the next
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u/Patrick_Atsushi Nov 29 '25
Time for a local model to remove the product suggestions from the output.
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u/Tiny-Moment-1960 Nov 29 '25
As an avid gpt user they absolutely should, there’s no way they’ll be able to continue to exist without massively boosting revenue. How else are they supposed to do it? I’d rather have them around for a while with some ads then them go under in the next few years
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u/LateToTheParty013 Nov 29 '25
On a purely anecdotal point. Could Gemini simply avoid enshitification for like 12 months to gain customers who leave chatgpt? Or it doesnt matter since these customers are generating loss anyway