Ads are officially coming to ChatGPT

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Sam Altman once called ads in ChatGPT a “last resort” — but now, they’re officially on the way in which.

OpenAI will begin testing targeted ads totally free and budget tier users within the U.S., marking a controversial monetization shift that might set the tone for a way all the AI industry balances user trust with revenue pressures.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI officially bringing ads to ChatGPT

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Code out of your phone with OpenAI’s Codex

• Musk, OpenAI trade (more) public blows

• 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

📢 OpenAI officially bringing ads to ChatGPT

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced it should begin testing targeted advertisements in ChatGPT totally free and Go tier users within the U.S. — putting into motion a serious (and controversial) monetization shift for the AI giant because it eyes a late-2026 IPO.

The main points:

• Ads will appear below responses as “Sponsored Recommendations,” targeted based on conversations but excluded from health, politics, and underage users.

• The move coincides with the corporate’s $8/month ChatGPT Go tier launching globally, with ads included to offset the cheaper price point.

• Premium tiers (Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise) remain ad-free, with OAI pledging to never sell user data or let ads influence ChatGPT’s answers.

• Sam Altman had said in 2024 that ads in ChatGPT could be a “last resort”, but more recently said he “wasn’t totally against it” if it didn’t violate user trust.

Why it matters: We’ve heard conflicting statements from OAI’s leadership up to now on ads, however the March hiring of Instacart’s Fidji Simo hinted at each the IPO and promoting route. Ads in AI assistants are a slippery slope, so the execution might be a nuanced moment to observe — potentially setting the tone for the industry as an entire.

TOGETHER WITH THOUGHTWORKS

📈 Unify data, delivery and human expertise

The Rundown: AI/works is Thoughtworks’ agentic development platform that unifies expert technologists and many years of engineering excellence so you possibly can construct, modernize, and evolve enterprise systems faster.

Discover the way it lets you:

• Move from spec to code

• Construct once, reuse in all places, compound speed over time

• Integrate seamlessly along with your stack

See AI/works in motion.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature wherein we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and each day lives.

Rowan, Founder & CEO: Granola AI has turn out to be my meeting recorder outside of just Zoom meetings. I recently had a 3-hour meeting with legal for business structuring, and I turned on Granola AI on my phone (with other parties’ consent), and it picked up all the transcript nearly word for word (for over 3 hours!), which I later pasted into ChatGPT to go backwards and forwards on things that I didn’t fully grasp within the moment.

Joey, Head of Partnerships: I actually have been looking around at latest apartment development projects, seeking to potentially buy in the following two years. I used ChatGPT Deep Research to assist compare the associated fee, the standard of the appliances and materials the builders are using, and chart out the general cost.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Author: I exploit Ideogram and Reve for newsletter images, they usually’re impressively good even with minimal prompts. I’ll set a general style and tone, they usually consistently deliver solid renderings of the tech personalities we cover — the style has turn out to be a part of our storytelling.

AI TRAINING

📱Code out of your phone with OpenAI’s Codex

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn how one can 10× your code output with Codex by setting it up in Cursor, running it within the cloud from anywhere (even your phone), and configuring an agent that routinely reviews your code for you.

Step-by-step:

1. Install Codex by going to the Codex quickstart, choosing your IDE (Cursor), and launching a brand new Codex Agent inside that editor

2. Ask Codex to generate an agents.md file out of your project (or a PRD/spec if starting fresh), then initialize Git so Codex understands your codebase, rules

3. Explore slash commands (like /review, /status, and /context) to review changes, manage context, and control how Codex reasons across your files

4. Push the project to GitHub and connect it to Codex to access from anywhere, and enable automatic PR reviews so every pull request is reviewed within the cloud

Pro tip: Code locally in Cursor, then hand off reviews to cloud Codex — cloud runs don’t count against your local usage.

PRESENTED BY GURU

🧠 Your AI source of truth

The Rundown: Guru is the AI Source of Truth that connects your whole company’s tools and delivers cited, permission-aware answers in all places you’re employed. With one governed knowledge layer powering each your people and your AIs, teams move faster — with fewer blind spots and mistakes.

Guru lets you:

• Connect all knowledge with permission-aware access

• Get trusted, cited answers in chat and in all places else you’re employed

• Experience knowledge that improves and verifies itself

Learn more about Guru.

ELON MUSK & OPENAI

⚔️ Musk, OpenAI trade (more) public blows

The Rundown: Elon Musk and OpenAI continued to spar ahead of their April trial, with Musk sharing anecdotes from Greg Brockman’s 2017 private journal and Sam Altman accusing Musk of “cherry-picking” and OAI releasing correspondence of its own.

The main points:

• The file details Brockman’s convo with Ilya Sutskever on OAI’s structure and their desire to turn out to be a B-Corp, together with concerns over Musk’s involvement.

• Altman posted notes of Musk wanting to “accumulate $80B for a self-sustaining city on Mars” and a succession plan for his children to regulate AGI.

• OpenAI published a blog of its own highlighting context and discrepancies between Musk’s filing and Brockman’s notes, calling it “The reality Elon ignored”.

• Musk tweeted, “Cannot wait to start out the trial. The invention and testimony will blow your mind”, and is reportedly looking for $134B in damages within the lawsuit.

Why it matters: Get the popcorn ready, folks. If the early discovery nuggets are any indication, we’re in for the messiest, most costly AI lawsuit ever — and a front-row seat to the origin story of tech’s biggest current arch-rivalry. Either side clearly think the complete record helps them, which implies April is about to get VERY entertaining.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🧠 Scroll.ai – Turn any knowledge base into enterprise-grade chatbots, with accuracy and depth far beyond generic models*

• 💼 Claude Cowork – Claude Code’s agentic abilities, now available to Pro tier

• ⚙️ Replit – Recent capabilities to simply construct and deploy mobile apps

• 📸 FLUX.2 Klein – BFL’s latest ultra-fast, powerful AI image editing model

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

Black Forest Labs released FLUX.2[klein], a brand new speed-focused variant of the corporate’s powerful AI editing model.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that China’s models “could also be only a matter of months behind” U.S. labs, but have yet to point out innovation surpassing the frontier.

Elon Musk announced that xAI’s Colossus 2 supercomputer powering Grok is now live, marking the world’s first operational gigawatt cluster on the planet.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced latest AI partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral, enabling training on the corporate’s 65M+ articles.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar published a blog revealing the corporate hit $20B+ in annualized revenue for 2025, tripling YoY, with compute expanding 10x since 2023.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Forest in Texas:

“I used to be sick of ‘Scam Likely’ ruining my dinner. So, as an alternative of getting mad, I got even. I built a digital bodyguard named Forest. He uses OpenAI and a custom voice model to sound exactly like a confused elderly man.

His instructions are easy: be polite, have an interest, but never, ever allow them to close the deal. The Consequence: Sweet, sweet revenge. I get to hearken to recordings of scammers losing their minds arguing with an AI about armadillos, and I didn’t should lift a finger.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Murati’s cofounders return to OpenAI

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Wikipedia inks deals with Amazon, Meta

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: 1X now has a world model

• Today’s AI tool guide: Code out of your phone with OpenAI’s Codex

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: AI Foundations Bootcamp pt. 3

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown