Wouldn't want to give out valuable ad space[1] for free now would we.
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From the tweet in your linked post:
> This could help OpenAI give free users more generous usage and features, while users on paid plans stay ad free, which fits with the high costs of running ChatGPT and the revenue they expect from shopping and ad related features
They will put ads in the paid ChatGPT tiers. That is an absolute certainty. The only question is how long will they tolerate un-advertised eyballs on paid plans.
I could see ChatGPT search results having affiliate links for shopping stuff even for fully-paid users.
There's a lot of competition in this space, so we'll see what users tolerate. But it's going to be tough getting around the fact this stuff is expensive to run.
Things like this are only 'free' for a reason.
What's expensive is innovating on current models and building the infrastructure. My understanding is inference is cheap and profitable. Most open source models cost less than a dollar for 1 million tokens which makes me think SotA models likely have a similar pricepoint, but more profit margin.
Yup, because people who pay for subscriptions are far more valuable ad targets than people who might be too poor or too disciplined to convert on the advertised products.
And the more you pay for a subscription, and the more others purchases they can correlate you making behind the scenes once they have a fingerprint for your identity, the more and more valuable your eyeballs become, and therefore the more challenging it becomes to resist selling your eyeballs on the ad market.
Even if a service you subscribe to isn't placing obvious ads in front of your face today and promising they never will, they're 100% strategizing ways to either make the ads less obvious or to sell your data upstream so that the ads you see elsewhere are more convincing. Better hope you like buying stuff!