> Your conversations are private from advertisers
But presumably your requests and ChatGPT’s responses will guide what ads users see. Whilst conversations might be private from advertisers - the products that are suitable for the user would be shared.
If a user asks ChatGPT “what oil should I put in my Honda civic”. ChatGPT can search for suitable products but the page will also be showing ads for motor oil - presumably Honda civic motor oil.
Was curious whether ads would cover the cost of inference, so a bit of napkin math.
They seem to display ~3 ads per minute, on tech products, presumably with pretty good signal and intent based on recent chat history. Not the most up to date on CPM but based on some basic searches we assume $30 per thousand impressions, that’s about 9c per minute and ~$5 per hour. Of course users aren’t always looking at the agent coding, but averaged out over say 3 hours of usage per day, that kinda covers the cost. The $10 per day limit is probably related to average daily session use.
On ChatGPT showing an ad per conversation with good signal and intent audiences could have pretty high CPM or CPC too, easily $0.01 to $0.10 per conversation? I think that’s easily sufficient to cover the API pricing for ChatGPT 5.2 instant or mini thinking for the majority of users queries.
Sure man, until ads became unbearable and intrusive. The good old times are gone. This is the future.
But if the alternative of ads is communism it is not enshittification.