AI: Chatbot answers now come with ads
We’ve already reached “the beginning of the end of ad-free ChatGPT,” said Madison Mills in Axios. Like the social media companies that came before it, Sam Altman’s OpenAI has realized it “has to make money at some point.” Last week, the startup officially began testing ads for U.S. users on both its free and lowest-priced subscription tier. The ads that users will see are “shaped by what you’re discussing” with the chatbot. Someone researching recipe ideas, for instance, may be shown an ad for a grocery delivery service. The company says it will avoid promoting anything during “sensitive” conversations, like those about mental health or politics; won’t show ads to under-18s; and won’t share personal data with advertisers. But its decision to introduce ads at all immediately became a “key sticking point” in the AI race.
OpenAI rival Anthropic wasted no time seizing on Altman’s cash grab, said Alex Kirshner in Slate. It rolled out a series of ads during the Super Bowl in which a “dead-behind-the-eyes” person representing ChatGPT pivots mid-conversation “into selling something rather than just answering the question.” Anthropic has vowed never to place ads on its chatbot, Claude—though Altman not too long ago also said ads would be “a last resort” for OpenAI. “The most interesting thing” about the brewing rift, however, is that it has increasingly become “about what AI
should be for in the first place.”
Anthropic can sit on its high horse for now, said Maxwell Zeff in Wired, but ads on ChatGPT were inevitable—and Claude probably isn’t far behind it. While both companies offer subscription services, ranging from $20 a month to $200, most AI users “never pay a dollar,” and bills are adding up. OpenAI has raised $64 billion from investors but has generated “only a fraction of that” in revenue. And Altman has said it will take a trillion dollars in spending to realize his AI ambitions. He “previously acknowledged the failures of the social media era,” including the creation of addictive algorithms that maximized engagement to drive more advertising revenue. Yet Altman now risks repeating the mistakes of Facebook and TikTok.