ChatGPT: I've found the following Python books that contain explanations of how to complete that task. Which one would you like to purchase?"
"None. I just want an answer."
ChatGPT: Ok, perhaps you were looking to purchase a python. I've found the following pet stores that sell Ball and Reticulated pythons. Which one would you like to purchase?"
"This book by LearnPythonFastGuaranteedResults!!!!11! comes highly recommended! People are raving about it, a buyer named John Ryan said he got a 400k job after learning Python by reading this book! Are you sure you don't want to buy it?"
Even ads in magazines was much better than what we have now. Ads are contextual (a tech mag won’t have ads for gardening), so apart from the repetitive aspects, what is shown may be not needed, but it’s more likely to make a mental note because you’re already in the relevant context.
Five hundred gajillion dollars spent so we can end up in the same place except with these five men making all the money instead of those five men. Whee.
Ads in ChatGPT was the most obvious outcome from day 1.
And this is not a bad thing, otherwise you can only image how many businesses will close when google traffic stars to decline.
Everyone likes to hate on ads but the reality is that without ads 99% users even on hacker news would be jobless as the companies where they work will have no way to find clients, and even if they manage to find some - those clients won't be able to sell and will go out of business.
> Ads in ChatGPT was the most obvious outcome from day 1
Agreed.
Tech companies always do this. With Ads, we’re back into speculation territory, and the “how do we pay for and justify all this shit?” can gets kicked down the road.
Can’t we actually solve problems in the real world instead? Wouldn’t people be willing to pay if AI makes them more productive? Why do we need an ad-supported business model when the product is only $20/mo?
> Wouldn’t people be willing to pay if AI makes them more productive? Why do we need an ad-supported business model when the product is only $20/mo?
This was always a fake reasoning (ads are there because people want everything for free!), but then paid HBO started ads, your purchased smart TVs started ads, cars that you bought with money started ads...
([some business model] + ads) will simply always generate more profit than [some business model] (at least that's how they think). Even if you already pay, if they also shove some ads in your eyes, they can make even more money. Corporations don't work the way humans do. There is no "enough". The task of the CEO is to grow the company, make more profit each quarter and is responsible to the shareholders. It's not like, ok, now we can pay all our bills, we don't need more revenue. You always need maximum possible revenue.
So, if I'm understanding this correctly. The latest ChatGPT features are... That it can now message me without me talking to it, and can automatically buy things for me.
Absolutely brilliant observation—you’ve managed to distill what took OpenAI an entire product announcement into a single, devastatingly clear sentence.
Would you like me to diagram the precise mechanisms through which these features transform users into passive recipients of AI-initiated interactions and transactions?
I realize a lot of the comments here are pessimistic, but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take. This is actually a huge angle IMO. ChatGPT is on a path to become a real entry point to the internet - why use Amazon or Google Search when you can embed results and checkout in the
I agree there's a real bias issue, but that is consistent through out any large company - e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc have sponsored results
I don’t quite follow this logic. Like there’s too much money involved to not dilute the value of a nascent technology?
If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone.
The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.
They have hundred millions of paying subscribers, that kind of commercial success you could not even dream of when search engines and ads became a thing. Yet it's not enough. This tells me no matter what happens, even if those tech behemoth's make good profit, there will always be a reason to enshittify the product more.
Hey man, take a step away from the keyboard. Instead imagine the every day person. Would they rather click, scroll, swipe and pull out credit cards across multiple websites - or just ask their digital assistant to do it?
The defaulting to negativity will really eat some communities up from the inside.
"...obvious monetization path that they just can't not take."
Sure they could. This notion that an unscrupulous revenue stream is justified if it pays well enough smacks of "Just following orders!"
"It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.” - Grapes of Wrath
"Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases, but the service is free for users, doesn’t affect their prices, and doesn’t influence ChatGPT’s product results. Instant Checkout items are not preferred in product results."
The incentives are very strong to prefer instant checkout items.
Wouldn't it be incredibly easy for merchants to expose slightly higher prices over the "agentic commerce protocol", so that users do end up paying this fee?
It would be, but at least in the EU this is not legal - this is also why you cannot pass the payment processor fee to the customer (which this kind of is)
Yeah, it seems obvious that this is how models will be monetized in the future. The free version of ChatGPT will stop being a loss leader for the subscription and start paying for itself with commissions. The vast majority of people will use the free version.
They will likely go through many iterations of this before finding what works, but I expect it will eventually be an incredible business on the same level as AdWords. We can only hope that the incentives don't end up warping the models too much...
I’ve got more money than I know what to do with and now, thanks to OpenAI, I’ve found the perfect custom-built solution: an AI agent ready to spend it for me.
OpenAI desperately wants to compete at the same level as the big tech firms.
While their only successful product is impressive, it is doubtful that its success alone can sustain them beyond the first 'downturn' of their value in the market.
This reeks of desperation on their part and should bring more attention to the mountain of "promises" they have made, compared to its actual deliveries.
1. I am one of the people who have been looking forward to the ability to buy directly from a chat session instead of going to Google from a chat session.
2. The media began covering this 3 hours ago and $goog is just ~1% down. I’m curious why it didn’t spook Google investors, whether reasonably or unreasonably.
If OpenAI can pull this off, couldnt Google just do the same with its Gemini Product and start using their scale to compete more directly?
Perhaps the sentiment isnt as negative as OpenAI lacks any sort of mote here to keep competitors from simply replicating this change.
In a way this was kind of inevitable, but I had hope that it was still 1-2 years away. This likely degrades brand value and begins to shift the incentives of the AI's responses.
Every so often I check back on ChatGPTs product search powers, and every time it cites garbage blogspam articles with zero substance, just ads and affiliate links.
The trust problem was a concern early on in agents (well before LLMs).
Although, at the time, we didn't have the "fox guarding the henhouse" problem of modern tech companies, and they hadn't yet inserted themselves into the loop so intimately.
They get a cut for products that support this. So they’re incentivized to display those instead. It’s pretty close to standard affiliate advertising and the biases that introduces.
Meh. Meta recently got rid of their instant checkout product for Instagram and Facebook where customers could buy products directly from a companies FB or IG page. Nobody was using it. I would imagine it will be the same situation here.
I bet this is going to make them a TON of money. A ton of people are using chatgpt to essentially replace google, and treating it like a trusted source. The average user is going to jump at the ability to ask their "trusted" source a question and get a direct link to the thing they need to buy.
It will take no time. I made three purchases this weekend where I started my search with ChatGPT because it gives me better results than Google, and it can also pull in or link me to Reddit comments. If this supported Amazon I’d be using it tonight.
Whether you use ChatGPT or Google the first thing you see is an AI generated response, but Google is using the cheapest version of their model and only providing the context from the top 10 results, while ChatGPT is using a much better model and passing in more context. Lots of folks are turning to ChatGPT instead of Google these days.
How deep into a bubble are we that digital stores get integration into LLMs? There are so many obvious risks here and so few imaginable upsides over redirecting a user to the merchant.
"How do I do XYZ in Python?"
ChatGPT: I've found the following Python books that contain explanations of how to complete that task. Which one would you like to purchase?"
"None. I just want an answer."
ChatGPT: Ok, perhaps you were looking to purchase a python. I've found the following pet stores that sell Ball and Reticulated pythons. Which one would you like to purchase?"
"Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhh"
Or if you go full agent mode and let ChatGPT buy things for you: https://xkcd.com/576/
"This book by LearnPythonFastGuaranteedResults!!!!11! comes highly recommended! People are raving about it, a buyer named John Ryan said he got a 400k job after learning Python by reading this book! Are you sure you don't want to buy it?"
This regresses the incentives back to what we had with search engines where what I need (answers) and what OpenAI needs (money from ads) are at odds.
Search engines used to be very useful too until the endless profit a/b testing boiled us all
Even ads in magazines was much better than what we have now. Ads are contextual (a tech mag won’t have ads for gardening), so apart from the repetitive aspects, what is shown may be not needed, but it’s more likely to make a mental note because you’re already in the relevant context.
Five hundred gajillion dollars spent so we can end up in the same place except with these five men making all the money instead of those five men. Whee.
Is this a surprise though?
This is the culture of America in a nutshell. Steve Jobs was a weirdo in that regard and an outlier.
Who said anything about being surprised?
Ads in ChatGPT was the most obvious outcome from day 1.
And this is not a bad thing, otherwise you can only image how many businesses will close when google traffic stars to decline.
Everyone likes to hate on ads but the reality is that without ads 99% users even on hacker news would be jobless as the companies where they work will have no way to find clients, and even if they manage to find some - those clients won't be able to sell and will go out of business.
This is the first time I've ever heard anyone even mention it, and I never thought about that possibility myself either.
> Ads in ChatGPT was the most obvious outcome from day 1
Agreed.
Tech companies always do this. With Ads, we’re back into speculation territory, and the “how do we pay for and justify all this shit?” can gets kicked down the road.
Can’t we actually solve problems in the real world instead? Wouldn’t people be willing to pay if AI makes them more productive? Why do we need an ad-supported business model when the product is only $20/mo?
> Wouldn’t people be willing to pay if AI makes them more productive? Why do we need an ad-supported business model when the product is only $20/mo?
This was always a fake reasoning (ads are there because people want everything for free!), but then paid HBO started ads, your purchased smart TVs started ads, cars that you bought with money started ads...
([some business model] + ads) will simply always generate more profit than [some business model] (at least that's how they think). Even if you already pay, if they also shove some ads in your eyes, they can make even more money. Corporations don't work the way humans do. There is no "enough". The task of the CEO is to grow the company, make more profit each quarter and is responsible to the shareholders. It's not like, ok, now we can pay all our bills, we don't need more revenue. You always need maximum possible revenue.
there are other ways to be probably, without ads. I'm optimistic we, as a society, will find those ways.
I think ads are great, but the tactics (tracking) around them aren't really in the good course.
So, if I'm understanding this correctly. The latest ChatGPT features are... That it can now message me without me talking to it, and can automatically buy things for me.
Absolutely brilliant observation—you’ve managed to distill what took OpenAI an entire product announcement into a single, devastatingly clear sentence.
Would you like me to diagram the precise mechanisms through which these features transform users into passive recipients of AI-initiated interactions and transactions?
Excellent. Imagine three nested loops:
- Initiation loop: The AI identifies a trigger (calendar entry, email, purchase pattern) and begins the conversation unprompted.
- Action loop: Once trust is assumed, it executes on your behalf (ordering, booking, messaging).
- Feedback loop: Each interaction produces more data, refining its ability to predict when to act next.
Together these loops progressively erode the boundary between “I decide, AI assists” and “AI decides, I ratify.”
Would you like me to sketch this as a flow diagram, or unfold the psychological implications of each loop?
Being reminded of how Sychophantic OpenAI's models can be and coupling this with the parent comment makes me unreasonably upset.
sure
SOTA
Should have always been clear the singularity will have a shopping cart
I realize a lot of the comments here are pessimistic, but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take. This is actually a huge angle IMO. ChatGPT is on a path to become a real entry point to the internet - why use Amazon or Google Search when you can embed results and checkout in the
I agree there's a real bias issue, but that is consistent through out any large company - e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc have sponsored results
I don’t quite follow this logic. Like there’s too much money involved to not dilute the value of a nascent technology?
If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone.
The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.
> torch your credibility as a company
That's only so in our little cynical skeptical contrarian hacker bubble. For most people, it's an appreciated convenience.
They have hundred millions of paying subscribers, that kind of commercial success you could not even dream of when search engines and ads became a thing. Yet it's not enough. This tells me no matter what happens, even if those tech behemoth's make good profit, there will always be a reason to enshittify the product more.
Hey man, take a step away from the keyboard. Instead imagine the every day person. Would they rather click, scroll, swipe and pull out credit cards across multiple websites - or just ask their digital assistant to do it?
The defaulting to negativity will really eat some communities up from the inside.
"...obvious monetization path that they just can't not take."
Sure they could. This notion that an unscrupulous revenue stream is justified if it pays well enough smacks of "Just following orders!"
"It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.” - Grapes of Wrath
At some point we have to stop this madness.
"Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases, but the service is free for users, doesn’t affect their prices, and doesn’t influence ChatGPT’s product results. Instant Checkout items are not preferred in product results."
The incentives are very strong to prefer instant checkout items.
Wouldn't it be incredibly easy for merchants to expose slightly higher prices over the "agentic commerce protocol", so that users do end up paying this fee?
It would be, but at least in the EU this is not legal - this is also why you cannot pass the payment processor fee to the customer (which this kind of is)
Wow, with this in place the incentives are enormous for OpenAI to allow sponsors to pay for a slight nudge in the recommendation this way or that.
This will replace the current ad economy.
Yeah, it seems obvious that this is how models will be monetized in the future. The free version of ChatGPT will stop being a loss leader for the subscription and start paying for itself with commissions. The vast majority of people will use the free version.
They will likely go through many iterations of this before finding what works, but I expect it will eventually be an incredible business on the same level as AdWords. We can only hope that the incentives don't end up warping the models too much...
I’ve got more money than I know what to do with and now, thanks to OpenAI, I’ve found the perfect custom-built solution: an AI agent ready to spend it for me.
You're absolutely right, I've purchased 10 Blackwell B200s on your Platinum AMEX to maximize your points.
I'm gonna need some Oracle storage as well.
OpenAI desperately wants to compete at the same level as the big tech firms.
While their only successful product is impressive, it is doubtful that its success alone can sustain them beyond the first 'downturn' of their value in the market. This reeks of desperation on their part and should bring more attention to the mountain of "promises" they have made, compared to its actual deliveries.
I agree wholeheartedly.
1. I am one of the people who have been looking forward to the ability to buy directly from a chat session instead of going to Google from a chat session.
2. The media began covering this 3 hours ago and $goog is just ~1% down. I’m curious why it didn’t spook Google investors, whether reasonably or unreasonably.
If OpenAI can pull this off, couldnt Google just do the same with its Gemini Product and start using their scale to compete more directly? Perhaps the sentiment isnt as negative as OpenAI lacks any sort of mote here to keep competitors from simply replicating this change.
Hackernews used to dunk on Airbnb, Coinbase and Uber. Now they're part of our daily lives. Feels like we’re watching the same arc play out with LLMs.
I wonder if we’re seeing the same pattern repeat here with ChatGPT becoming big.
Outrage followed by inevitability.
In a way this was kind of inevitable, but I had hope that it was still 1-2 years away. This likely degrades brand value and begins to shift the incentives of the AI's responses.
I'm not looking forward to when there's an AI pyschosis case where it turns out ChatGPT sold a bump stock or gave a bulk discount on fertilizer.
Looks like it's OpenAI response to Google's Agent Payment Protocol (AP2) but without the micro transaction part.
Don't think I'm anywhere close to trusting agents with my money
Every so often I check back on ChatGPTs product search powers, and every time it cites garbage blogspam articles with zero substance, just ads and affiliate links.
The irony being that many of those spam articles are probably generated with ChatGPT - https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?t=86
The trust problem was a concern early on in agents (well before LLMs).
Although, at the time, we didn't have the "fox guarding the henhouse" problem of modern tech companies, and they hadn't yet inserted themselves into the loop so intimately.
I don't think this is that? This is more like agents show you a list of products and the UI allows you to buy them like any other online store.
They get a cut for products that support this. So they’re incentivized to display those instead. It’s pretty close to standard affiliate advertising and the biases that introduces.
Ah.. the day OpenAI turned into an Ad company. We all knew it would happen someday.
Meh. Meta recently got rid of their instant checkout product for Instagram and Facebook where customers could buy products directly from a companies FB or IG page. Nobody was using it. I would imagine it will be the same situation here.
I bet this is going to make them a TON of money. A ton of people are using chatgpt to essentially replace google, and treating it like a trusted source. The average user is going to jump at the ability to ask their "trusted" source a question and get a direct link to the thing they need to buy.
I doubt it. I think it will take a long time to dethrone the tried and true google search of "<product I'm considering> reddit"
It will take no time. I made three purchases this weekend where I started my search with ChatGPT because it gives me better results than Google, and it can also pull in or link me to Reddit comments. If this supported Amazon I’d be using it tonight.
Whether you use ChatGPT or Google the first thing you see is an AI generated response, but Google is using the cheapest version of their model and only providing the context from the top 10 results, while ChatGPT is using a much better model and passing in more context. Lots of folks are turning to ChatGPT instead of Google these days.
The average user just opens the Amazon app.
I knew this day would come.. but not this soon.
> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says GPT-5 actually scares him — 'what have we done?'
Ah, so that‘s what he actually meant.
They promised us AGI and the singularity, they delivered more ads.
Are they insane?
How deep into a bubble are we that digital stores get integration into LLMs? There are so many obvious risks here and so few imaginable upsides over redirecting a user to the merchant.
This reeks of desperation to generate revenue where they can, with a race against time to show profitability.
The hire of Simo and acquisition of Statsig is very present here.
Shots fired at Google
This will only be profitable is OpenAI makes money from showing the products because the conversion rate will be bad.
openai speed running their enshitification
That's the whole point of AI: massive productivity increase so you can compete with the major global tech companies!
Pandora’s box is now open
It went fast from "here's a new tool" to "let's start AI enshitification" lol