  One thing odd, maybe just to me, is why OpenAI has been stuffing its ranks with former Facebookers who are known to juice growth, find edges, and keep people addicted. They have little background in getting enterprises to buy into a product. Simo herself ran the Facebook app. That organization’s genius is consumer engagement: behavioral hooks, dopamine loops, the relentless optimization of the feed. You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style.

This is because ChatGPT is gearing up to sell ads. It's the only way to sustain a free chat service in the long term. Ads require engagement and usage. Hiring former Meta employees for this is smart business - even if HN crowd doesn't like it.

People say OpenAI is burning money and is on the verge of collapse. The same people will say OpenAI building an ads business on ChatGPT is "enshittifcation". These people are quite insufferable, no offense to the many who are exactly as I described.

▲ pipnonsense 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So that’s why I am getting clickbaity last sentences in every response now at ChatGPT.

Things like ”If you want, I can also show a very fast Photoshop-style trick in Krita that lets you drag-copy an area in one step (without copy/paste). It’s hidden but extremely useful.”

Every single chat now has it. Not only the conversational prompt with “I can continue talking about this”, but very clickbaity terms like: almost nobody knows about this, you will be surprised, all VIPs are now using this car, do you want to know which it is? Etc

▲

KellyCriterion 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I find -again- Claude (web) here outstanding & very comfortable:

In most of my discussions throughout the day, it doesnt ask any "follow up" questions at the end. Very often it says thingslike: "you have two options: A - ..... and B - while the one includes X and the other Y..."

But this is was OP underlined: Claude is popular amongst businesses, most "non-tech" people dont even know that it exists.

▲

buzzy_hacker 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same here. “Do you want the one useful tip related to this topic that most people miss? It’s quite surprising.”

If it were so useful, just tell me in the first place! If you say “Yes” then it’s usually just a regurgitation of your prior conversation, not actually new information.

This immediately smelled of engagement bait as soon as the pattern started recently. It’s omnipresent and annoying.

	▲	dostick 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, ChatGPT just recently started to add these engagement phrased follow-ups; “If you want, I can also show you one very common sign people miss that tells you…”
	▲	Esophagus4 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can tell it not to do this in your personalized context. The model doesn’t always obey it, but 80% of the time it’s worked for me.

▲

dkrich 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This and also constantly saying stupid things like “yes that is a great observation and that’s how the pros do it for this very reason!” for a specific question that doesn’t apply to anything anyone else is doing

▲

jjallen 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is not just OpenAI though. I don’t think this is new in general for these AI chat apps. Claude at the very least asks a question as the last part of its responses I believe every time.

▲

Bengalilol 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those "Prompt-YES-baity" last sentences are somehow counterproductive.

▲ darth_avocado 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> One thing odd, maybe just to me, is why OpenAI has been stuffing its ranks with former Facebookers who are known to juice growth, find edges, and keep people addicted

There is a very simple answer for this: that’s how leadership ranks work in SV. When one “leader” moves from Company A to Company B, a lot of existing employees are pushed out or sidelined, and the ranks are filled with loyalists from previous companies. Sometimes this works out, but a lot of time it doesn’t and it stays that way until another “leader” is brought in. What’s good for the company doesn’t matter unless there clear incentives and targets lined out for them.

▲ deanc 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is ubiquitous to the point where it's permeating almost every desk job in the world. Even those who don't work are using AI to help them find work, research health problems, ask questions about their daily life. I can't think of anything else since the invention of the internet that has had this much of an impact on people's lives.

People will have to pay for this. I don't see it being free for long other than a few chats a day. If most people in the world are paying 10-200 bucks a month then AI companies will make money, and I doubt they will need to rely much on ads at all.

▲

sanitycheck 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Anecdotally I know approximately zero 'normal' (non-tech) people who are intentionally using generative AI, several who have been badly misled by Google's AI summaries, and quite a few who are vehemently anti-AI (usually artists and writers).

(Except when mandated by their employers, which nobody is happy about or finds particularly useful.)

	▲	deanc 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Every single person I know outside of my profession is using it, including all relatives of all ages. Even if it's at the top of the google search results :)

▲

pipnonsense 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or people are just using as much because it is free.

▲

username223 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I can't think of anything else since the invention of the internet that has had this much of an impact on people's lives.

If you reach a bit farther back, there's opium, an impactful product with limitless demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

▲

bananaflag 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

On the other hand, costs are getting lower with time.

Sort of how now I have an unlimited 5G data plan for like 10 dollars, and in 2011 I didn't even have Internet on my phone. This is happening also with AI.

▲ reactordev 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

100%. It’s about to become the sleaziest used car salesman the internet has ever seen.

▲ DarkNova6 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In other words, they need more experts on enshittification.

▲ Esophagus4 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The worst are the ones who say things like “OpenAI only has 5% paying users!” As if that’s a really bad number. That is the same ratio YouTube, the world’s largest media company, has. And ChatGPT has like 800m users after only a few years of existence.

And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram…

Some people are really rooting for the downfall of OpenAI that will simply not happen, and their rage makes them utterly unreasonable.

	▲	username223 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram… Enshittification only works for the middleman in a two-sided market, which is what those things are. LLMs are a commodity, so their path to monopoly profit is very different.