Two days after Google claimed it had no current plans to put ads in its Gemini AI app, OpenAI announced Friday that it would begin testing ads on ChatGPT.
Fiji Simo, CEO of OpenAI’s applications division, said in a blog post that free users and Go subscribers ($8 per month) in the U.S. will start seeing ads at the bottom of their chatbot answers in the coming weeks, opening up a significant new revenue stream for the fast-growing startup valued at $500 billion by investors.
This is a moment that many in the technology industry have long considered inevitable. Frontier AI models are prohibitively expensive to run, consuming vast amounts of computing power, electricity, and GPUs. Advertising revenue streams are hard to resist. OpenAI expects to generate revenue of “just under a few billion dollars” this year, and more each year thereafter, the FT reported on Friday, citing an anonymous person “close to the company.”
While Google has so far refrained from placing ads in its standalone Gemini chatbot app, the company is incorporating ads into the AI summaries that appear in online search results, a move seen as essential as the company looks to expand its $265 billion-a-year advertising business into the AI era.
OpenAI said in a blog post that future ads will be clearly labeled and users’ conversations with ChatGPT will be private. “People should know that their data and conversations are protected and will never be sold to advertisers,” the company said. “We want to keep the bar high and give users control over their experience so they can see truly relevant, high-quality ads. They can also turn off personalization if they want.” It also said that ads do not influence ChatGPT answers, which are “optimized based on what is most useful to users.”
OpenAI emphasized that subscriptions remain a long-term priority, saying its $20 per month Plus and $200 per month Pro subscriptions, as well as the Business Enterprise version of the product, will remain ad-free. “Our enterprise and subscription businesses are already strong, and we believe there are diverse revenue models where advertising can play a role in making intelligence more accessible to everyone,” the company wrote.
Still, the company focused on tying its advertising efforts to its overall mission so that advanced general intelligence (AGI) “benefits all humanity,” Simo wrote.
“Advertising supports our efforts to make AI accessible to everyone by making ChatGPT free and affordable,” OpenAI said in a separate blog post on Friday.
