Brace Yourself: ads could come to ChatGPT in the future
AI is expensive. Major players have a number of options to finance their operations. Some receive funding, like OpenAI does. There is also the option to charge for early access or priority access, which OpenAI, Google, and others are doing. Then there is the option to develop AI as part of a larger organization. Google does that with Gemini, for instance.
There is also the business and Enterprise world to consider. Access to APIs is another revenue source.
Another option that will likely rise in popularity in the near future is the use of ads. Some AI systems may display ads already. Microsoft's Copilot on Windows, for instance, may show ads. Perplexity, another popular system, started advertising experiments less than a month ago.
OpenAI may go down the same route. The company earns money from paid subscribers currently and is burning through a lot of money that it received in financing rounds.
A report (paywalled) by the Financial Times confirms that OpenAI is considering ads. OpenAI would integrate ads into ChatGPT or other company products to help finance the costs of running and developing AI systems. While not mentioned explicitly, it is possible that only non-paying users would see ads when they use the platform.
Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at OpenAI, told the Financial Times that the company would be thoughtful when it came to the integration of ads on the platform. She claims that the company has no "active plans to pursue advertising".
A Financial Times analysis of OpenAI's hiring shows that the company did hire advertising talent from companies like Google and Meta recently. In May, the company hired Shivakumar Venkataraman, who led Google's search advertising time before joining OpenAI as vice-president.
Friar and Kevin Weil, OpenAI's Chief Product Officer, do have advertising experience. Weil helped build ad-supported products at Instagram and X.
OpenAI is working on a search engine, which could also open up possibilities of integrating advertising. The ads would feel natural to the majority of users, as most search engines use display ads to generate revenue.
Even if OpenAI is not pursuing plans to inject ads into products right now, it has to become profitable eventually.
Friar is aware of the drawbacks of ads according to the Financial Times article. Ads could make a company shift from focusing on users to pleasing advertisers.
Closing Words
AI could go down the route of streaming services. Start with an ad-free experience, offer paid plans, only to introduce ads at a later point in time. Most will probably experiment with ads at the very least.
Now it is your turn. Do you mind ads in free products? If there would be a paid ad-free option, would you take it instead? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
MicroSoft is pushinng Ai into it’s OS systems. To me this isn’t good. LORT helps us all!
I think eventually AI will become a pay to use sort of product. We have already seen how search became commercialized so I do not expect AI to be any different. I am not even sure many are even willing to pay for a lot of AI on a personal level of use. Remains to be seen how it matures and already it does seem like its hit or miss on how useful it can be.
I am sure there are AIs that are useful to businesses, especially in manufacturing, scientific research and video production. That mostly because they use limited private data or if they scrape YouTube videos it’s from top channels. But so far I have not seen AI that is worth to pay money for average consumer with one exception.
My conspiracy theory is: Most AI makers are building their databases on scrapping websites like Reddit, Quora and few others that are not factually based for most parts, but mostly opinion collections. When their data is compromised, the result of your AI search is going to be too. Even Wikipedia is compromised as data source. Unpaid moderators, who have final say on what stays and what goes, fix Wikipedia pages according to their own politics/worldview. On top of this, Wikipedia will bend the knee to most corporations or politicians to remove any unflattering mentions or just RetCon the history. I do not see real AI useful search results in visible future. AI will mimic the truth as much as it can, but in reality it will mirror the point of view of programmers that will put hard exceptions on topics they do not want to cover and compromised data sources. At this point, I am more likely to believe in the possibility of better regular Google search than good search AI.
Now about one exception. I think it’s called Grandma AI. If you think you could be getting scammed over your phone, turn on Grandma AI and will waste the scammer’s time, and he will never call you again. Clever concept if somebody put you on easy target list.
Good thing I don’t use any of that AI garbage.
Never used this garbage, only tried the so-called “AI” to draw pictures for me one time for 5 minutes, after that the novelty wore off, it got boring and I forgot about it. I only remember this “AI” garbage from news articles on tech websites, otherwise I completely forget about it.
People who use this don’t realize what they are losing – their autonomy and independence. It’s the thing that causes brain rot and people being unable to critically think for themselves. Yet some fools really get wet over this garbage and don’t even realize the rabbit hole they are getting themselves into.
It’s always about the opportunity cost. I neither need nor am interested by AI, and if I very seldom am then a basic AI chatbot as provided by DuckDuckGo is sufficient. What I can assert is that I’d really have to be in great necessity together with no ad-free top-notch AI to accept enduring advertisement : the slightest ad whisper is immediately shut, not one ad and that’s the way I intend to carry on. I’d rather pay, but ads, nops.