As of the new year, OpenAI has made plans to begin implementing advertisements to their services as part of maintaining operations and paying back companies. Back in Oct. 2024, Sam Atlman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, said “I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model,” referring to methods of monetizing ChatGPT, the company’s large-language model (LLM). It now appears that all other avenues have been exhausted.
On Jan 16, the company announced it would be “planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers” in order to continue to provide the services for free and eight dollars per month, respectively. Acknowledging that many people rely on the chatbot for directions, opinions and advice on a huge variety of topics, the company has also detailed its advertising principles.
They are largely focused on ensuring that the overall experience of using ChatGPT is not impacted, along with the preservation of user privacy, which carries with it a promise to never sell user data to third parties. Additionally, the company has declared that it does not optimize ChatGPT for total user time spent, unlike other advertising platforms such as Instagram or YouTube.
With ChatGPT having over 800 million users, just 35 million of which pay for the platform according to Reuters, even small-scale rollout of advertising in the U.S. alone could prove to be a much-needed financial lifeline for the company.
According to Forbes, OpenAI has committed to some $1.4 trillion in commitments over the next few years. These commitments are to various AI-related companies that offer OpenAI crucial support for model training, compute capacity and web services in order to further improve ChatGPT. Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia are among the companies who are owed tens to hundreds of billions of dollars from OpenAI.
Despite this, their total revenues to date total slightly less than 30 billion dollars, and their all time venture capital raised is less than 100 billion. While the trillion dollars owed is not due right away, OpenAI and ChatGPT have promised to quickly upscale their advertising efforts in order to meet their commitments.
