Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.

Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.

This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?

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noodlescb an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"A billion people use the ChatGPT"

lol uh source? even if you generously count my dad trying it out once out of curiosity in response to the news or w/e that doesn't seem true.

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KerrAvon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's relevant politically, and the discussion in question is political.

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altmanaltman 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai

	▲	monster_truck 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This should be upvoted more. Saying it is not easy is an understatement. The chasm is so large that if you were to represent it on a globe it would rival oceans. I've been brought into places that were bought for half a billion+ to try and claw back half of a tenth of a percent of traffic. A redesign is pushed through that minimizes content, inflates metrics, and triples the ads. Users leave, everyone is fired, it's written off and the cycle repeats. OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive. The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).

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IsTom 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.

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vovavili 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A median non-technical ChatGPT user is:

-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use

-Will not self-host an open-source model

-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker

	▲	nomel 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And, most people have no interest in trying something new.

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128byte 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!

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Someone1234 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.

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tempacct2cmmnt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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moritzwarhier 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If not now, when?

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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ofjcihen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.