alt Hacker NewsOpenAI is in a pickle because they either have to make ads clearly delineated, which makes them easy to filter out by a simple proxy model, or they need to hide ads in the response (ala product placement), which reduces trust in the model and forces customers into a buying position.
Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker.
If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.
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The elegant solution is to rent space in the system prompt to advertisers. $X per character per hour, up to 1000 characters.
Kind of ironic as claude code keeps showing this "get $50 bucks for referral" when coding on $200/mo plan, so fucking annoying. Hypocrites.
Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this