[ahmedhawas123]

I realize a lot of the comments here are pessimistic, but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take. This is actually a huge angle IMO. ChatGPT is on a path to become a real entry point to the internet - why use Amazon or Google Search when you can embed results and checkout in the

I agree there's a real bias issue, but that is consistent through out any large company - e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc have sponsored results

[ehnto]

> but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take

Now that they are a commercial entity, you are right. If they had remained on their original mission path though I suspect this wouldn't be the no-brainer it is now.

[jstummbillig]

The "original mission path" was a) not viable and b) would not have included a product to begin with. So it actually is a no-brainer: None of this would apply, because ChatGPT simply would not exist.

[ehnto]

Not viable to achieve what?

[jstummbillig]

Not viable to achieve the stated goal of creating AGI (originally) as a non-profit, because the best way anyone has so far figured how to maybe do that is apparently too expensive, both in terms of capex and opex.

[Gud]

Perhaps if they had remained true to their original mission, they would have been able to recruit the genius required.

[rhetocj23]

Lol this is delusional.

If the latter was true, Google would take its tremendous cash balance and earnings and reinvest into what is necessary to reach AGI right now.

OAI has a funding problem. Google in comparison most certainly does not. Google could go raise funding for it right now too.

The real issue is the lack of confidence behind the supposed theory that more aggressive reinvestment yields AGI.

[TZubiri]

Google invests millions in AI since forever, see DeepMind team's trajectory, TPUs, etc...

[theptip]

Yeah, it’s a very sensible feature to add. Obviously lots of users are making “please recommend a <product>” queries, it’s a usecase where deep research really shines.

So if your users are spending a lot of time on a tasks, why not make it more delightful?

Of course, you need to make sure you don’t allow accidental purchases, that would be the way you destroy trust. But assuming a clear intent to purchase is established, then I think this will be well-received.

[matsemann]

But it could also destroy their brand. Right now I think most people somewhat "trust" LLM recommendations (just glossing over the hallucinations). But more and more results in the future will either be sponsored products, or spam bots having poisoned the data set by having spammed reddit and the likes.

So I'm afraid of a steep enshittification of this use.

[thwarted]

I got spam sales email yesterday touting that exact thing. Paying for product placement in conversations with chatbots, claiming it's "not an ad".

[stephen_g]

Really though, I think that kind of grift was inevitable given the incredible amount of capital poured into the LLM craze… The more money went in, the faster it was going to happen - how else could they generate a return on that much money?

[theptip]

Honestly - consumers couldn’t care less, if the product experience lets them get things done. And especially if there is a free version. Google, Amazon, etc are some of the most popular brands in history, while they were doing much more egregious ad tracking.

I think this is a blind spot for this community, personally. Like, it’s right to care about this stuff, but I think we are wrong to think other people care too.

[tedd4u]

Add bias to the bot though, right? I don’t want GPT shilling its wares to me, motivated by whatever it thinks the most likely to convert item or the item with the greatest fee is.

[fourside]

I don’t quite follow this logic. Like there’s too much money involved to not dilute the value of a nascent technology?

If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone.

The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.

[janalsncm]

They are already groveling to Nvidia for cash. It’s very likely the options are not “no ads” vs “ads”. The options for them are “no free tier” and “free tier with ads”.

[ehnto]

Perhaps they'll use a lightweight advertising model to watch the output of chats, and look for product placement opportunities.

That's a "fun" thought experiment if they did do that, because the advertising model inference will need to run cheaply enough compared to the conversion rate/margin on clicks. I suspect it will be really hard to beat Google Ads on cost if you have to run inference on all chat output for each ad placement. It could put ChatGPT into a higher end/higher cost advertising platform.

[bonoboTP]

> torch your credibility as a company

That's only so in our little cynical skeptical contrarian hacker bubble. For most people, it's an appreciated convenience.

[Analemma_]

I don't think this is true. I heard the exact same claim about Alexa making it easier to order diapers or whatever with one voice command: "sure, HN users don't want this, but normal people do". But I know many non-tech people who have Amazon Echo devices, and they never, ever use them to buy things. For them it's a timer-setting device only. That's why Amazon wrote off that entire division as a billion-dollar loss.

I think "people want frictionless ways to purchase products" is a PM pipe dream more than a description of reality.

[foobarian]

> I think "people want frictionless ways to purchase products" is a PM pipe dream more than a description of reality.

I get what example you are referring to, but there are degrees here. For example the Buy Now flow really is handy; and I find I favor merchants that let me pay by scanning some kinda QR code from Apple Pay or Venmo. I definitely don't miss the friction of having to go dig out my credit card, mistype the cc#, type the wrong cvc if Amex, repeat the purchase after getting declined once and responding to a fraud text, etc.

[rhetocj23]

Its kinda bizarre really.

How does Alexa ever compare with the rich experience of interacting with a store through the various senses? Its typical that technologists tend to come up with this stuff and what happens in reality is wildly off compared to what was expected.

Buying stuff means spending money. it turns out most people don't have a lot of money (something that Mr Altman would never be able to understand given his privileged background) so they want to see and experience the transactions that take place. Same reason why this agent nonsense is not going to work from an economic stand point.

[Esophagus4]

Exactly - while you and I might route our DNS queries by carrier pigeon to avoid tracking, some of my family actually like personalized ads on social media and even buy things from them.

[fishmicrowaver]

I installed an ad blocker on our home Internet on a raspberry pi. My wife told me to take it off.

[kyriakos]

To be fair dns ad blocking causes problems to everyday browsing, I understand your wife complaining about it.

[fishmicrowaver]

You are correct, however I shared this anecdote because her stated reason was she missed the ads.

[array_key_first]

I have never met anyone who enjoyed ads. These people do not exist.

They might fall for ads. In the same way I smoked for years and hated smoking.

[dbbk]

Yes they have to make money somewhere to survive, and subscriptions is obviously not the answer

[libraryatnight]

"...obvious monetization path that they just can't not take."

Sure they could. This notion that an unscrupulous revenue stream is justified if it pays well enough smacks of "Just following orders!"

"It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.” - Grapes of Wrath

At some point we have to stop this madness.

[neuralRiot]

Most people has been convinced throughout the years that individual actions have no effect on big corps, they need to learn that it shouldn’t matter. If you don’t agree with what a service or product provider does simply don’t buy their product find an alternative or just don’t but do it just for your own principles.

[ethbr1]

> If you don’t agree with what a service or product provider does simply don’t buy their product find an alternative

This implies antitrust has been sufficiently enforced such that there are viable alternatives in all markets.

That's not currently true.

[what]

Do you run an ad blocker? If so this feels a little hypocritical, you should just bounce from the site and seek an alternative if you don’t agree with what they do.

[siva7]

They have hundred millions of paying subscribers, that kind of commercial success you could not even dream of when search engines and ads became a thing. Yet it's not enough. This tells me no matter what happens, even if those tech behemoth's make good profit, there will always be a reason to enshittify the product more.

[throw-qqqqq]

It sounds like you think OpenAI is a profitable business? As far as I understand, it’s not.

OpenAI is projected to generate $12-14 billion in yearly revenue in 2025 (annualized from a single month), but expect to lose around 8 billion USD, implying the margins are negative.

OpenAI has raised a total of ~$60 billion.

I think they need to show investors a huge and growing cashflow to keep the show going.

[joe_the_user]

OpenAI has a subscription revenue stream that's more than sufficient to keep current basic operations going. It is losing money because most of that money is spent on research, more and more GPUs, very expensive people and other capital expenditure.

Of course, they can't just retreat to selling their basic services since some other company would train and produce a marginally better model.

So it's a paradoxical situation. They're moving in contradictory directions - both to become a thing so valuable they'd only need to sell subscriptions and towards a mote if they don't reach that "AGI" thing. No reason being flexible would displease their shareholders but there are many other questions to answer here (who gets AGI raptures, who gets the Skynet/Terminator treatment, who decides, etc).

[rhetocj23]

The valuation of OAI would be peanuts if it stopped reinvesting too. Which will destroy the value of equity and therefore employees certainly wont be happy.

Im not really sure where Altman is going. As time goes on, it seems the walls are closing in and he's just throwing all he can to keep the hype alive.

You cant escape fundamentals forever, I dont care who you are.

[janalsncm]

Right, so given that R&D is not optional lest they fall behind, they need to find another revenue stream.

[famouswaffles]

They have hundreds of millions of subscribers, but the vast majority of them are not paying, and more importantly, are not monetized in any way.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

With increasing competition from all sides driving down the margins. Sure ChatGpt is a household name now, but if Microsoft/Google offer the same thing for half the price, plenty of cost conscious subscribers will bail to the cheapest offering.

[podnami]

Hey man, take a step away from the keyboard. Instead imagine the every day person. Would they rather click, scroll, swipe and pull out credit cards across multiple websites - or just ask their digital assistant to do it?

The defaulting to negativity will really eat some communities up from the inside.

[throwawa14223]

Chat windows and voice assistants are a terrible user experience for the average person. This doesn't change that.

[prawn]

I think there's a difference between a typical website chat window and how many people would use ChatGPT. The latter has tables, images and links which is enough to build up comparisons, order sheets and then ultimately have a format for confirming a purchase. I use it a lot for doing basic home construction comparisons (materials, volumes, etc) and could definitely see it getting to the point that it organised an order for me to submit, and eventually to where the submission and payment were within the chat.

A voice assistant doesn't give you that option to review, but maybe it'd work for ordering fast food. A small chat window could grow to work for simple purchases like takeaway food or small hardware, etc.

[lynx97]

I am not so sure about that. The modern web has become complicated/unusable enough that I can see a lot of people prefering a chat interface over having to click through this unholy mess. I might be biased, as I have to deal with accessibility ussues on a daily basis. However, there is a whole demographic we're currently leaving behind. There are a lot of people around who simply don't try to use the Internet to get things done, because they are overwhelmed with how it works. My mother doesnt even want to click on a YouTube link sent to her via WhatsApp, because she would leave the well-known app and have to deal with the web... However, I can imagine her using an agentic interface to get things done, although not right now, maybe in 2 years.

[thenanyu]

I don’t understand how you can make this statement in the midst of chatGPT being the fastest growing consumer app in history.

[ileonichwiesz]

That’s exactly what the folks at Amazon thought when they came up with Alexa. Have you ever bought anything online by asking Alexa to do it? Have you ever seen anyone else do it?

[Terr_]

I think the "every-day person" simply isn't wealthy enough to (persistently) care about that level of delegated convenience versus the risks of getting the wrong product or ripped off.

[GenerWork]

The fact that you're being downvoted over this is proof that people here work and live in a bubble. People value convenience and are willing to pay for it, and if OpenAI is able to advance convenience through these actions, they'll make billions.

[skydhash]

Does the average user does this? Granted, I’m not i. the USA, but does people really order that much on unusual websites?

[rudedogg]

You see negativity, I see disappointment that OpenAI isn’t trying to innovate, and instead hoping they can replay Google Search’s history for themselves

[lossolo]

> They have hundred millions of paying subscribers

They have hundreds of millions of users in total (free tier included), with around 10-15 million paying users.

[dbbk]

Those subscriptions are at a loss

[lynx97]

You just discovered the (capitalist) idea of growth... Any management of a big corp not going for the seemingly endless growth idea is going to be fired by their shareholders pretty quick.