Financial pressures and a changing tune
OpenAI’s promoting experiment reflects the large financial pressures facing the corporate. OpenAI doesn’t expect to be profitable until 2030 and has committed to spend about $1.4 trillion on massive data centers and chips for AI.
Based on financial documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal in November, OpenAI expects to burn through roughly $9 billion this yr while generating $13 billion in revenue. Only about 5 percent of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users pay for subscriptions, so it’s not enough to cover all of OpenAI’s operating costs.
Not everyone seems to be convinced ads will solve OpenAI’s financial problems. “I’m extremely bearish on this ads product,” tech critic Ed Zitron wrote on Bluesky. “Even when this becomes business line, OpenAI’s services cost an excessive amount of for it to matter!”
OpenAI’s embrace of ads appears to come back reluctantly, because it runs counter to a “personal bias” against promoting that Altman has shared in earlier public statements. For instance, during a hearth chat at Harvard University in 2024, Altman said he found the mix of ads and AI “uniquely unsettling,” implying that he wouldn’t prefer it if the chatbot itself modified its responses as a consequence of promoting pressure. He added: “When I feel of like GPT writing me a response, if I needed to go determine exactly how much was who paying here to influence what I’m being shown, I don’t think I would really like that.”
Along those lines, OpenAI’s approach appears to be a compromise between needing ad revenue and never wanting sponsored content to look directly inside ChatGPT’s written responses. By placing ads in banners at the underside of answers separated from the conversation history, OpenAI appears to be addressing Altman’s concern: The AI assistant’s actual output, the corporate says, will remain uninfluenced by advertisers.
Indeed, Simo wrote in a blog post that OpenAI’s ads is not going to influence ChatGPT’s conversational responses and that the corporate is not going to share conversations with advertisers and is not going to show ads on sensitive topics corresponding to mental health and politics to users it determines to be under 18.
“As we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT invaluable in the primary place,” Simo wrote. “Which means you might want to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by promoting.”
