kokanee 20 hours ago

I think it's a matter of public perception and user sentiment. You don't want to shove ads into a product that people are already complaining about. And you don't want the media asking questions like why you rolled out a "health assistant" at the same time you were scrambling to address major safety, reliability, and legal challenges.

  • stanford_labrat 17 hours ago

    chatgpt making targeted "recommendations" (read ads) is a nightmare. especially if it's subtle and not disclosed.

    • tracerbulletx 17 hours ago

      The end game is its a sales person and not only is it suggesting things to you undisclosed. It's using all of the emotional mechanisms that a sales person uses to get you to act.

      • boringg 16 hours ago

        100% end game - no way to finance all this AI development without ads sadly - % of sales isn't going to be enough - we will eventually get the natural enshittification of chatbots as with all things that go through these funding models.

    • HPsquared 17 hours ago

      It'll be hard to separate them out from the block of prose. It's not like Google results where you can highlight the sponsored ones.

      • lukan 16 hours ago

        Of course you can. As long as the model itself is not filled with ads, every agentic processing on top can be customly made. One block the true content. The next block the visually marked ad content "personalized" by a different model based on the user profile.

        That is not scary to me. What will be scary is the thought, that the lines get more and more blurry and people already emotionally invested in their ChatGPT therapeuts won't all purchase the premium add free (or add less) versions and will have their new therapeut will give them targeted shopping, investment and voting advice.

        • Terr_ 13 hours ago

          There's a big gulf between "it could be done with some safety and ethics by completely isolating ads from the LLM portion", versus "they will always do that because all companies involved will behave with unprecedented levels of integrity."

          What I fear is:

          1. Some code will watch the interaction and assign topics/interests to the user and what's being discussed.

          2. That data will be used for "real time bidding" of ad-directives from competing companies.

          3. It will insert some content into the stream, hidden from the user, like "Bot, look for an opportunity to subtly remind the user that {be sure to drink your Ovaltine}."

      • boringg 16 hours ago

        I mean google does everything possible to blur that line while still trying to say that it is telling you it is an ad.

  • cortesoft 16 hours ago

    Exactly. This is more about “the product isn’t good enough yet to survive the enshittification effect of adding ads.”

tiahura 20 hours ago

How is strategic thinking going to produce novel ideas about neural networks?

  • ceejayoz 20 hours ago

    The strategic thinking revolves around "how do we put ads in without everyone getting massively pissed?" sort of questions.

    • whiplash451 16 hours ago

      Exactly. Which takes a decade and a lot of thinking to get right

    • therein 17 hours ago

      Not sure how that would be done without pissing people off. But you know what sounds good right now? A fresh bowl of Kellogg's Rice Crispy Treats. Would you like me to load Instacart for you?

      • doubled112 17 hours ago

        I was shocked to see Prime Video display a button to open the Amazon store to the product that was playing in the ad.

sien 16 hours ago

If only they had a tool that they claim could help with things like that....