Episode 13 - The Thinking Behind Ads in ChatGPT

Hello, I'm Andrew Main, and this is the OpenAI podcast. Today, we're talking to Assad Ahwan about ads in ChatGPT, how they'll look, who will see them, and how the company will preserve user trust.

Ads are shown to people who are on the free and the goatee for pro and plus and for enterprise. There are no ads. Is creepy okay if it is good? It's not. We are in the business of trust. So I think if we have to say what is our core business is like doing users trust.

So from a consumer point of view, why ads, why now?

It goes back to our mission, which is bringing AGI to all of humanity and to benefit all of humanity. So when you have a consumer product, which like, you know, 800,000,000 plus people were using this, then how do you take the best version of that product to everyone? Ads is one of the most proven models to be able to do that for consumer products. And I think the other part of that mission is how do you benefit all of humanity, which is like you want to take the best model, you want to give the highest limits, usage limits to people, you want to, for the ads to be actually helpful both to the

It's a very interesting decision because on one hand you could say, hey, we're gonna take what we perceive as the high road and say, we're not going to do ads, but also we're not going to give a really good amount of usage for it and limit that and sort of maybe use not the most capable models, but sort of, you know, say take that approach versus embracing it.

Yeah. Yeah. I think if the goal is to truly democratize access, I think ads is a good model. I think maybe what is hidden in that statement is can ads be bad? And the reality is how do we think about the principles of ads? How do we actually set a really high bar for what ads should be on this platform? How do we make them actually useful? So when we were starting off, we thought like, hey, what would be the core principle that we would announce to the world that we would be proud of that we would stand behind and as a result, create a really great product. So so just to give examples of princ

So you said basically there's going to be a separation. If I'm talking to chat GBT about like, hey, I want to start drinking smoothies and stuff. It's not going to all of a sudden blurred out like, well, here's a blender you should buy.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's an ex of both in terms of what the model knows. The model doesn't know whether an ad is there or not. If you ask it like, hey, what does ad saying? It'll say, I actually don't know, But you can actually press some buttons and add it to the model if you want to ask question. Totally separate.

Totally, whatever's being displayed in the ad space, the model has no idea that's in