this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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technology

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[–] BeanisBrain@hexbear.net 85 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

we will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you

so-far

[–] crosswind@hexbear.net 53 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That is literally the fundamental concept of an ad. What could they possibly do that could be called an ad, but wouldn’t fit that description? You’d need a very creative definition of “influence” or “answer” or “give”

[–] Red_October@hexbear.net 37 points 3 weeks ago

Advertising is so fucking evil and ingrained in our shit society. We’re at the point where it takes a fundamental hatred of advertising to even see why it is clearly fucking wrong.

I want science dictating what medicine we should take. Not a fuckhead finding new ways to sell opiates to suburbia moms and the parents of children who need therapy.

[–] rubber_chicken@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago

That's a load of rich creamery butter.

[–] MF_COOM@hexbear.net 57 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

An example of ads I like are on Instagram

Deranged thing to say

[–] Krem@hexbear.net 36 points 3 weeks ago

"ads I like (as a person getting paid to put ads in shit)"

ads on IG are hard to separate from the "content", they're just there. they blur the line between "regular stuff posted by humans" "ad-promoted regular stuff" and "just 100% an ad", so for his business purposes makes sense that he likes them

[–] SoyViking@hexbear.net 29 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

An example of ads I like ~~are on Instagram~~

Deranged thing to say

[–] goferking0 3 points 3 weeks ago

Oh god how many more terrible Ai will be made for the super bowl 😭

[–] SoyViking@hexbear.net 48 points 3 weeks ago

We will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you and we keep your conversations private from advertisers

janet-wink

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 43 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don't want to pay

thonk

[–] sewer_rat_420@hexbear.net 28 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

There are some incredible whales on the platform, performing hundreds of queries every single day, many people I think are using it as an emotional crutch.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The vibe coder guys straight up burn like $200-400/hr just screaming at 10 looping instances of Claude to write shitty JS code

Which is why programmers are safe because we can write that same shitty JS code for $30-50/hr.

[–] BountifulEggnog@hexbear.net 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

many people I think are using it as an emotional crutch.

But how do we sell them shit?

[–] sewer_rat_420@hexbear.net 4 points 3 weeks ago

As others have said:

Sorry you are feeling down. The McDonald's meal deal usually cheers you right up!

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 34 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Just like how all creatures on earth eventually evolve into crab, all technology mutates to it's highest form of evolution, the ad break.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

i sense you feel distressed dave, would a tasty pizza™ help you?

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 21 points 3 weeks ago

Pouring my heart out to chatgpt about my life only to have it hallucinate totinos pizza rolls made out of human flesh.

[–] CloutAtlas@hexbear.net 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Someone link the Boonta Vista opening where a person named "Alt Samman" has been made immortal and is cursed to have his penis and testicles snipped off slowly by coconut crabs every day only for them to regrow the next day.

[–] invo_rt@hexbear.net 12 points 3 weeks ago
[–] DoctimusLime@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago

Well said. Eat the rich asap obvsly, these billionaires are way too comfortable, Mario's brother did what?

[–] microfiche@hexbear.net 32 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Desperation to not go tits up amongst other things is causing them to squander their first to market advantage.

They're damn near insolvent aren't they?

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 25 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

they are comfy burning vc injections, which they can afford to if they aren't on the hook for those 500 billion deals, selling some equity at 15 billion spend a year is affordable, 150 billion - not so much

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Near? Buddy they've been setting tanker ships of money on fire to stay afloat for at least two year now. Accountants have developed entirely new collateral schemes just to support this "industry".

[–] microfiche@hexbear.net 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Buddy, I don't give a rats ass about AI generally let alone one specific AI company.

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 27 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don't want to pay, so we are hopeful a business model like this can work

hm, do you think they'll do the smart thing and have the chatbots reprint advertising copy and premade images? Or are they gonna burn even more tokens generating ✨unique ads nobody wants or reads?

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 27 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

the smart thing is actually organically generate the tokens for ads, and influence consumer behavior, because that's what would print them money. i once again remind that people are getting divorced and going on "planned" trips with that damned thing, of course naturally suggestible users will go for a bit of fresh snack™ when their trusted friend produces tokens that they need a crunch of brandname™

(not to mention supplements and pills)

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 16 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Would it be effective advertising? Yes. Would it be a profitable business model for OpenAI? Ehhhh... kinda doubt it. Advertising (and tracking) may subsidize practically all search engines, but I don't think there's anywhere near enough marketing departments with the kind of spending budget Sam Altman needs to dig himself out of the hole.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 9 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah from what I hear each query costs several pennies to run responses, magnitudes more than a search on an engine.

The sad truth is when it does crash western governments will bail them out, in exchange for deals, private kickbacks and preferential treatment/ pervertion of results.

Central banks like the fed will bail all big players out too, this so called monetary easing, buying bad corporate bonds, is just disguised bailouts.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

It’s enough to finance google and meta, no? 5% of that will make him a new zuck

[–] fox@hexbear.net 20 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

The difference is that what they're doing is cheap on a per-user-operation level. If Google makes $0.00001 per search, but they spend a tenth of that serving it, they come out ahead. OpenAI and LLMs generally are so massively unprofitable that they cannot recover the cost of a query through ad spend at any price an advertiser would be willing to pay.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The expensive part of LLMs is the training though. Actual token output is rather efficent and quite cheap. For example, for Deepseek to generate a 200 token paragraph of text it costs about $0.000084. Image generation is also rather expensive, but most of the data centers and cost are around training models, not serving LLM output. It still might be more expensive than advertisers are willing to pay, but not crazy expensive.

[–] fox@hexbear.net 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

You'd think, but efficiency gains are erased by the LLMs having bigger context windows and self-referencing "thinking" or "agent" modes that massively extend token burn. There's public data out there showing how training costs are an enormous fixed point, but then inference costs very quickly catch up and exceed the training cost.

A model that's token-efficient is a model that's pretty useless and a model that's useable for anything is so inefficient as to have massively negative profit margins. If there was even one model out there that was cost effective for the number of tokens burned, the provider would never shut up about it to buyers

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Wow, really? I guess context windows have been going up but did not realise they were so ruinously expensive. Where can I read more about this?

[–] fox@hexbear.net 2 points 3 weeks ago

Ed Zitron is chugging the haterade but he does a lot of good reporting on this stuff. https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Depends if they are more effective, innit. You are reaching demographic which likely not seeing ads, aspiring rich tech bros and bored professionals. Like getting 1000 divorces is 10 mil in lawyer fees, which is somewhere around the numbers they already achieve for free, here and there they could find those 10 billions

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Facebook was never burning billions of venture capital just as operating expenses.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago

uber was, but in any case, ad market has what, 1 trillion of surplus value stolen to grift? It’s plausible to find 20 billion there. Again, data center build out is nutso, those they cannot fund, but inference for college student with first credit card? Maybe

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 6 points 3 weeks ago

No, that was Uber. Lol.

[–] CarmineCatboy2@hexbear.net 14 points 3 weeks ago

By the way in CES the AI companies were saying that their idea for ads is consumer goods fraud. IE pharma company gives them money, the bot advertises the med and subtly claims alternatives are bad for you. The example given was antihistamines, Allegra and claiming anything other than Allegra will make you drowsy.

[–] LaughingLion@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago

"Some heavy users are able to do that much fentanyl in one go but new users and relapsing users might overdose - in which case it would be wise to buy a burial plot at the Oakridge Cemetary currently running a promotion right now."

[–] aanes_appreciator@hexbear.net 4 points 3 weeks ago

we've done it, folks. we've reinvented the search engine, but worse!