Financial pressures and changing tunes
OpenAI’s advertising experiment reflects the enormous financial pressures facing the company. OpenAI does not expect to be profitable until 2030 and has committed to spending about $1.4 trillion on large data centers and chips for AI.
OpenAI is expected to spend about $9 billion this year, while generating $13 billion in revenue, according to financial documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal in November. Only 5 percent of ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users pay for a subscription, so it’s not enough to cover all of OpenAI’s operating costs.
Not everyone is convinced that ads will solve OpenAI’s financial problems. Tech critic Ed Zitron wrote on Bluesky, “I am extremely negative on this advertising product.” “Even if it becomes a good business line, OpenAI’s services cost too much!”
OpenAI appears to have adopted ads reluctantly, as this is in contrast to the “personal bias” against ads that Altman has previously shared in public statements. For example, during a heated talk at Harvard University in 2024, Altman said that he found the combination of ads and AI to be “uniquely unsettling”, meaning that he would not like it if the chatbot changed its responses due to advertising pressure. He added: “When I think about the GPT writing me a response, if I have to find out who is paying how much here to influence what is shown to me, I don’t think I would want that.”
A mock-up example of an ad in ChatGPT has been provided by OpenAI.
A mock-up example of an ad in ChatGPT has been provided by OpenAI.
Credit: OpenAI
Along those lines, OpenAI’s approach appears to be a compromise between the need for advertising revenue and not allowing sponsored content to appear directly in ChatGPT’s written responses. By placing banner ads below replies that are separated from the conversation history, OpenAI appears to address Altman’s concern: The company says the AI assistant’s actual output will remain unaffected by advertisers.
Indeed, Simo wrote in a blog post that OpenAI ads will not influence ChatGPIT’s conversational responses and that the company will not share conversations with advertisers and will not show ads on sensitive topics like mental health and politics to users under 18.
“As we introduce advertising, it’s important that we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” Simo wrote. “This means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by something objectively useful, not advertising.”
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