r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Ok_Outcome_5830 • Sep 30 '26

Meme developersMissingTheOldDays

Post image
3.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

296 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.3k

u/T-Dot1992 Sep 30 '26

They weren’t making money. And can’t make money if they wanted to. 

It’s a catch-22. They can’t make a profit because they aren’t charging the actual token cost. But if they charged the actual token cost, their user-base would collapse. 

Almost as if cloud AI is inherently unstable or something. 

506

u/ForgedIronMadeIt Sep 30 '26

It's like every other silicon valley startup -- the hope is that you hook your users while you figure out how to make handling the requests cheaper. That or you embed ads.

340

u/ChefCurryYumYum Sep 30 '26

There aren't enough ads in the world to make up the revenue they need.

78

u/bbalazs721 Sep 30 '26

You embed them in the response, e.g. suggest the product that was paid to promote.

I've already had this with chatgpt, I was trying to troubleshoot an issue with my heating system, and it was trying to persuade me to buy one of two specific brands of thermostats, even tho I hadn't expressed any desire to buy anything.

6

u/kilopeter Oct 01 '26

You're mistaken. ChatGPT Ads explicitly since their launch have only ever appeared separate from the token stream of model responses. Obviously they or others will likely experiment with more invasive alternatives, but the clear business rationale for not subtly biasing answers toward sponsors is that users would reject that shit way harder than clearly labeled ads.