Commercial ads could be a smaller revenue source than political ads.
Chats with LLMs are often intensely personal, you don't want to create the perception that politicians have any level of access to it.
Companies at this level do those kinds of moves all the time.
> (…) you don't want to create the perception that (…)
Right. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to do it, it just means they wouldn’t want you to realise they’re doing it.
Yes, but it has not stopped several companies to implement stuff like this to get more money.
So why chase this negligible revenue?
Unless they botch the implementation, it's not going to be negligible with ~800M+ free subscribers.
You'd be better off saying you use those people to A/B test changes and filling idle GPU batches while giving paying customers a more consistent experience.
Psychographic data. What they learn from these folks will create the most powerful manipulation technology yet.
Some brands are okay with impressions.. you can build trust in your product be advertising it for weeks/months and when the user does make a purchase that brand is on the mind.
Dang.
> The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.
Yeah, I guess this time around Sam Altman can't be lying about how many Monthly Active Users he has.