20260429 - OpenAI tries ads in ChatGPT. It won't save them

Hello, I'm David Gerrard and this is Pivot AI, coming to you daily. Today, Sam Altman scrabbles about for pennies. Here's Sam Altman at Harvard Business School in May 2024. He's answering an audience question about if he might put ads into ChatGPT. You'll see us do a lot more to make the free tier much better over time. And I'm interested in figuring out how we bring the equivalent concept to the API. But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. It's 2026 and OpenAI is getting a bit last resorty. OpenAI's business numbers for ChatGPT have never worked. Not ever. We've been yelling about this since 2024 when Alton was saying, no ads, OpenAI was spending $2.35 for each dollar of revenue then. It's only gotten more expensive since. It costs OpenAI so much money to serve ChatGPT, and OpenAI is starting to run out of other people's money. Near the end of 2025, OpenAI hired on a whole pile of people who most recently worked at Meta, ones who are quite well acquainted with Meta's stupendous digital advertising engine. Quote, staff have angsted over the prevalence of people at OpenAI who previously worked for Meta, and over whether OpenAI will become more like the social media and digital advertising giant. Unquote. Sam wishes it would. In November 2025, developer Tibor Blaho found a pile of ad code inside the ChatGPT Android app Quote ChatGPT Android app 1 beta includes new references to an ads feature with bizarre content search ad and search ads carousel In December, OpenAI floated ads in the chatbot output a bit more aggressively. Quote, Employees have discussed ways to tweak AI models to prioritize sponsored information in ChatGPT's responses when users ask relevant queries, a person familiar with the discussion said. For instance, a Sephora-sponsored beauty product ad could appear when the user is searching for mascara recommendations. Some employees feel an ads push would be counter to the company's loftier goals of achieving artificial general intelligence, or when AI can surpass human performance in a variety of tasks. Ads or Roko's Basilisk? Tricky one. Up and I went for the ads. The company announced in January it was going to start ad testing. On February 9th, the ads went live. ChatGPT shows the ads in a box below the chat. The ads only show up on the free and go levels for US-based users. The $20 a month subscribers won't see the ads. Yet. The ad program has just started up in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. OpenAI thinks the ad program is going to be the biggest thing ever. They claim ads will hit $102 billion by 2030. Quote, OpenAI expects advertising to generate about $2.4 billion in revenue this year and to quadruple next year to nearly $11 billion, according to financial forecasts from the first quarter which haven been previously reported In 2030 OpenAI expects ads to generate about billion or 36 of its total revenue for that year Unquote OpenAI is just making up imaginary future numbers to make their spreadsheets look a bit less bad. For comparison, Meta made $2.6 billion in ad revenue in 2025. That's across all. of Facebook, Instagram, threads, and WhatsApp. Netflix took in $1.5 billion from TV ads in 2025. OpenAI's ad prices start at $60 per thousand impressions. That's a lot. That's a premium ad rate. It's the sort of price live NFL football games get. I do not believe free OpenAI users are that premium. The ads are not so attractive to ad buyers, because OpenAI's advertisers can't show their clients if OpenAI ads even worked. Also, the ads were weirdly hard to buy. Quote, OpenAI hasn't yet offered marketers any automated way to buy ad space. Buyers have had to rely on making phone calls and sending spreadsheets and emails to OpenAI representatives, one ad executive said. More importantly, advertisers found it hard to tell whether the ads were paying off. That's partly because OpenAI hasn't provided advertisers with much information beyond how often people have viewed and clicked on the ads. That's a contrast to established digital media firms and ad technology companies which offer advertisers a clearer picture of the type of audience seeing an ad and whether it drove business." That is, the advertisers want the sort of intrusive personal data scraping they expect from Facebook and Google and our 900 trusted partners OpenAI understands this sort of personal data leakage is a formula for yet more bad press but also they really need the money especially charging premium ad prices OpenAI is running out of ready cash. At the moment, OpenAI is flailing about looking for money anywhere. So OpenAI is in due course going to give your personal details to 900 trusted partners, and it will tweak the output of the chatbot to be a bit more advertiser-friendly. They cannot afford not to. Ads aren't going to save OpenAI at their present burn rate. There's too much money going out, and OpenAI cannot pump through ads nearly fast enough to make up the fantasy numbers they're forecasting. The ads might make ChatGPT suck even more though. Thanks for tuning in to Pivot to AI. It's Pledge Week, and I need you to go to the Patreon link in the show notes and send in your $5. dollars. Or, if you're on YouTube and you prefer that, hit the join button below the video. We got some valued new patrons last night. I need five more today. Be one of those five. Click the link. You can be in the Patreon read tomorrow. After you join, put your name down in the post on the Patreon. Or, if you're a YouTube member, email me if you want your name read out. If you don't have money, that's fine. Please do tell just one other person about this episode. Hit like and subscribe on YouTube, and leave a nice review in your podcast app. It all helps a lot. Thank you all. I couldn't do this without all of you. I'll see you tomorrow, and bye for now. Public Service