we've done it, folks. we've reinvented the search engine, but worse!
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
90 points (100.0% liked)
technology
24173 readers
507 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
We will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you and we keep your conversations private from advertisers
we will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you
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”
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.
That's a load of rich creamery butter.
An example of ads I like are on Instagram
Deranged thing to say
An example of ads I like ~~are on Instagram~~
Deranged thing to say
Oh god how many more terrible Ai will be made for the super bowl 😭
"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
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.
It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don't want to pay
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.
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.
many people I think are using it as an emotional crutch.
But how do we sell them shit?
As others have said:
Sorry you are feeling down. The McDonald's meal deal usually cheers you right up!
"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."
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?
they are comfy burning vc injections, which will 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
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".
Buddy, I don't give a rats ass about AI generally let alone one specific AI company.
Just like how all creatures on earth eventually evolve into crab, all technology mutates to it's highest form of evolution, the ad break.
i sense you feel distressed dave, would a tasty pizza™ help you?
Pouring my heart out to chatgpt about my life only to have it hallucinate totinos pizza rolls made out of human flesh.
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.
Alt Samman
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?
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)
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.
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.
It’s enough to finance google and meta, no? 5% of that will make him a new zuck
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.
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.
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
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?
Depends if they are more effective, innit. You are reaching demographic which likely not seeing ads, aspiring rich tech bros and bored professionals.
Facebook was never burning billions of venture capital just as operating expenses.
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
No, that was Uber. Lol.