Hey all, Hugo here.

As you know, we’ve been working on ways to pay for all the new GPUs that will go into running JLLM v2 (hopefully launching very soon). One option we’ve been exploring is ads, which would help keep the model free while covering our costs and avoids some of the payment processing challenges.

We want to understand if this is viable, so we’re going to be running a small ads test to see if they might be able to provide enough revenue.

Starting later today, there will be a single ad shown on character pages for logged out users only. This is to get a benchmark on what advertisers might be willing to pay. The ads will look like this:

We’re not about to dump ads all over the site, and if we do decide to move forward with some kind of ads (not sure yet!), want to make sure we’re doing it in a careful and deliberate way that doesn’t make the site worse to use. We will keep you updated before any further changes here.

Anyways — if you see an ad on a character page while you’re logged out, this is why. If you have thoughts (either for or against ads!) please send them to me, we would love to hear them.

Also if you want to support janitor open an incognito tab and spam click the ads I guess lol.