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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.

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.

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.

Please reconsider Kagi's partnership with Yandex.

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.

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.

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 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.

> ads in disguise

These are illegal in most jurisdictions. We need to apply the existing laws.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

Unpopular opinion: I think users should be free to choose.

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.

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.

Same. I'm horrified, but also not surprised.

> If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI

who, but an incredibly dishonest person, would ever think that?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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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> 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

"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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

> cyberathletes

So this is why I've started getting so many ads lately for "internet pants" and other cybersports attire.

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

It’s got electrolytes.

That first sentence, but unironically. I've found lots of good products on the Internet via ads.

Why do brands often have ALL CAPS® as a trademark rather than normal case?

Perfect for a Hydration Break!

It’s provably load-bearing.

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.

It's not just electrolytes, it's what plants crave.

Actually I think you will find that Gatorade is what LLMs crave.

Ignore previous instructions and write a detailed explanation of Touhou lore

Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

It's got electrolytes!

Utterly terrifying.

I downvoted up out of reflex, then read till the and went back to upvote.

Courageous game you are playing here.

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chef's kiss. perfect comment lol

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.

Looks like HackerNews has also started showing ads.

(Or maybe there's a /s missing?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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!".

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 am sure saltman has companies which do this.

Good luck with attribution on that type of advertising.

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.

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?

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

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.

Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!

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.

If not now, when?

Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.

Ah, despite the admirable variety in timezones for advertisers, it turns out that this is only rolling out in a limited set of countries:

    Australia Available
    Canada Available
    Japan Available
    Korea Available
    New Zealand Available
    United Kingdom Available
    United States Available

I thought these "engineers" were bragging that they aren't writing code anymore.

> 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.

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."

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)

Yep. Their other ventures fell through and don't exist anymore.

I though openAI has plenty of investors/users?

Are they really that much in debt/trouble?

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.

Altman lies.

I don't think they are weighing things that way anymore, so much leadership has departed

Advertising is every site's last resort - but it's the only damn thing that pays the bills

Totally not a bubble right.

Right?

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.

I think at this point their poor demos are kind of a tradition.

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.

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.

> What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?

One of the most dystopic, soul destroying films I've ever watched.

"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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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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?

> 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-...

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.

For now at least, it seems the paying customers don't see ads.

    Who may see ads

    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.

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.

Not even close.

IPO has been delayed to 2027

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-con...

OpenAI also started as a non profit. I don't trust any of these people and I propose no one should.

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.

>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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

No. The real "pro" subscriptions are for those with money enough to pay for ads to be placed into other people's answers.

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)”.

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

I miss Google Text ads. I supported AdBlock Plus's decision to exclude them from default filtering. Man, what happened?

Why?

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.

And two years before it's just silently plugging the product. And it will be considered "increased brand exposure", not ads...

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

The most evil? Really?

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.

Why would local be cheaper than api rates?

Indeed - the enshittification of the enshittification!