OpenAI weighs ads for ChatGPT

Even Sam Altman's personal distaste for ads might not be enough to stop them from creeping into ChatGPT.

According to the Financial Times, OpenAI is weighing an advertising business model. CFO Sarah Friar told the outlet that the company is considering ads while planning to be thoughtful about where and when they appear. While Friar followed up by stressing that OpenAI has no active plans to pursue advertising right now, the signal is clear, especially after the recent hire of former Google ads executive Shivakumar Venkataraman.

Balancing extreme costs with AI ideals

Up to now, OpenAI has leaned on monthly subscriptions to fund the eye-watering compute costs required to train and run its models. But investor billions are not an infinite fuel supply.

Still, it is an awkward pill for Altman to swallow. During a recent fireside chat at Harvard Business School, Altman called ads a last resort, admitting he generally dislikes them and finding the concept of ads combined with AI uniquely unsettling.

Why it matters

For users, ads inside a generative chatbot bring a whole new set of trust issues. In a traditional search engine, a sponsored link is easy to spot; inside a conversational flow, it becomes much harder to tell where helpful advice ends and a paid product placement begins.

We think this shows that subscriptions alone simply cannot sustain frontier model development forever. If OpenAI opens the door to ads, it proves that even the most ambitious generative AI pioneers eventually have to bow to the classic business playbook that built Silicon Valley's traditional tech giants.