zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
Besides the editorial control -which openai openly flagged to want to remain unbiased- there is a deeper issue with ads-based revenue models in AI: that of margins. If you want ads to cover compute & make margins -looking at roughly $50 ARPU at mature FB/GOOG level- you have two levers: sell more advertisement, or offer dumber models.

This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn), they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and went with claude.

This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!) with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects against businesses optimizing for intelligence.

>>sdrinf+V71
The vast majority of people don't need smarter models and aren't willing to pay for a subscription. There's an argument to be made that ads on free users will subsidize the power users that demand frontier intelligence - done well this could increase OpenAI's revenue by an order of magnitude.

This is going to be tough to compete against - Anthropic would need to go stratospheric with their (low margin) enterprise revenue.