During a Harvard Fireside Chat in October, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed his reservations on introducing ads to ChatGPT: “I’m not saying OpenAI would never consider ads, but I don’t like them in general, and I think that ads-plus-AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me.”
However, with the company’s steadily growing $300B valuation, this decision may leave too much money on the table to ignore. Despite the CEO’s initial hesitation, OpenAI has been hinting at advertisements in its artificial intelligence products.
A recent Harvard University study found that product listings can be strategically altered to game LLM recommendations, boosting visibility for specific products. The specific method is called “Strategic Text Sequences” (STS) and it is where specific phrases are embedded into product descriptions to elevate their ranking in LLM outputs.
Will AI foundation models begin embedding ads in their output? And could product recommendations be sold to the highest bidder following in the footsteps of Google and Facebook?