Episode 13 - The Thinking Behind Ads in ChatGPT

Hello, I'm Andrew Main, and this is the OpenAI Podcast. Today, we're talking to Asad Awan 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 go tier. 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, it's like to win 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, um, to benefit all of humanity. Uh, so when you have a consumer product, which, like, you know, eight hundred million plus people were using this, then how do you take the best version of that product to everyone? Uh, um, uh, and, and ads is one of the most proven models to be able to do that for consumer products. Uh, 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, uh, a- for the ads to be actually helpful, both to the users and the businesses as well. Um, so, so I think it, it's a very natural fit for a company whose ambition is actually to take the best AI to all of, all of humanity.

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 gonna do ads, but also we're not gonna 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, like, if, if, 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?

Mm.

And, and the reality is, how do we think about the principles of ads? Uh, how do we actually set a really high bar-

Mm-hmm

... for what ads should be on this platform? How do we make them actually useful?

Mm.

So when we were starting off, we, we thought like: Hey, what would be the core principles 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? Um, so, so just to give the example of the principles, like, number one, the answers need to be independent from the ads-

Mm

... both visually, but also in how the models are trained and how the system works, um, so that you can always trust the answer. Like the whole product, ChatGPT product, is based on trust, so actually it needs to feed into that. Uh, the second is, your conversations are private. If you have a sensitive conversation, that will never have ads in it. Um, uh, and, and the conversations are never shared with advertisers. So while we do the matching between the best ad, that can be-