We're Joining OpenAI

Au contraire, based on their recent hires, they're just beginning their Facebook phase. Expect to see a lot of ads 2 years from now, and expect to see a LOT of money being made by the company a year after that.

If they can maintain runway until then.

> Expect to see a lot of ads 2 years from now

I think I am just slow today - but could you please elaborate?

Are people really going to keep using these AI tools if they start shoving ads down our throats?

Ads on ChatGPT as a way to extract more money from users

Worked for every tech company so far.

Just by the nature of the product, the manipulation will be a lot more subtle, and likely more successful than traditional ads..

It's terrifying.

Maybe something good comes out of the work to only push products that actually exist. /s

I wrote about this idea here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-ai-lifestyle-subsidy-is-go...

Quick summary, I believe consumer AI experiences will feature ads because the profit opportunity is too large and company valuations depend on it. The hiring of Fidji Simo (ads at Facebook) at OpenAI + and just this week, Vijaye Raji/Statsig also point that way.

Do you use any free web search tool?

And yet somehow it's even worse.

ChatGPT is already returning lists of products (with photos and rating) saying they are impartial, I guess to collect affiliate fees. It's not a big jump to have sponsored products showing up first.

So far it's about as subtle as a slap to the face. If you set ChatGPT's personality to 'straight-shooting' it starts every answer with "blunt", "tell it like it is" or "unvarnished" and permeates that across the whole reply; by its very nature, it is unable to be subtle about anything.

"I feel like something is missing in my life"

> Thinking...

> Have you ever had that energetic and refreshing feeling after a Baja Blast(TM)?

We’re in a golden period where AI results are ad-free.

One thing I’ve been doing is querying and storing results. For example, “what are the best books on X topic” for every topic I can possibly think that I may want to read about in the future.

I’ve found the results to be amazing if you give a sufficiently detailed prompt. I have enough reading to see me through to exit.

Yeah it could be insanely valuable and it'll give them an advantage by letting them add more features to the free ad supported product to expand their reach and cement their position.

(me again) and Drew Breunig just posted about the tensions of actually getting those ads in: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/09/02/considering-ad-models-fo...

By the time this „golden“ ad free time is over in 1-2 years you should be able to run your own custom model locally

If folks corrupt the integrity of LLM responses, as it were, they’ll destroy the value proposition.

More likely the model will be payment for low friction enablement of transactions rather than overt steering. Pick Door #1: the LLM states the product is fit for purpose. Pick Door #2: the LLM will directly complete the transaction or close to it.

One possibility is that if they can manage to lower interest rates back to zero ish, we might see a hiring frenzy in machine learning/llm/genai, starving upstarts and free software of talent, slowing progress in custom local models? Or is this too pessimistic/ "out there" of a take that requires the stars to align just right?

I see mcps from ebay alike coming to openai.

That hasn't been true for a while IME. Did you select 'Robot' as the personality?

I have Default personality with the traits field set to straight-shooter ("Tell it like it is; don't sugar-coat responses.") I'll try the robot one, thanks.

This is true, but it doesn't go far enough. Google could serve you ads, like LLMs will.

But LLMs can be used to astroturf internet spaces. Which means they allow everyone the ability to serve ads and manipulate. It's no longer just limited to the company providing the original service.

Yeah, that's a recent addition, as far as I can tell. It became available in my account a few weeks ago. I currently use 'Robot' mode, call myself a 'Researcher', and use these custom instructions:

    Answer concisely when appropriate, more extensively 
    when necessary.  Avoid rhetorical flourishes, bonhomie, 
    and (above all) cliches.  Take a forward-thinking view. 
    OK to be mildly positive and encouraging but NEVER 
    sycophantic or cloying.  Above all, NEVER use the 
    phrase "You're absolutely right."  Rather than "Let me 
    know if..." style continuations, you may list a set 
    of prompts to explore further topics, but only when 
    clearly appropriate.

Pretty happy with the results so far. Very low BS factor (although it does ignore the last part sometimes.)

> If folks corrupt the integrity of LLM responses, as it were, they’ll destroy the value proposition.

Highly unlikely. Google's SERP is an ad-infested abomination that sometimes shows useful results, and yet people still use Google Search.

The same will happen with LLMs, except in far more subtle and insidious ways. Instead of showing you ads directly, they will be naturally interwoven in conversations, suggestions, and generated content. You won't be able to tell whether the content is genuine or promoted, as is common on the web today.

The ads will target you more accurately than ever before based on not just the data you've given them, but on the context of the conversation, your surroundings, and any other piece of real-time information they can use to secure a conversion, or to influence your thoughts on a particular matter. You will trust it more than any current ad channel since the AI will be personal, and the tone will be friendly.

As with the web, ad-free services will exist, but the only way to escape this entirely will be to use local and self-hosted models.

I actually switched from Google to Kagi a few years ago. Whenever possible I avoid products with advertisements.

Who will pull the ads trigger first, OpenAI or Google I wonder. Whoever leads could lose a lot of users to the other, but they will soon follow.

I like the thesis, (and probably not a fully informed opinion here), it's easier for openai like router to go the affiliate model than ads model. Router can determine how much a query is worth (eg: help plan a vacation is worth $50 vs say what is the capital of Australia as $0). This further informs how much compute to use, and this can lead to how much they get on affiliate fees if a link is clicked. Ads here are counter to the proposition in the sense that results are to be trusted. Then, despite everything, while contextual ads are good, personalized ads are still going to be more effective (gut feel). To get there, openai needs the kind of infra Facebook and Google has. They can get the same value (perhaps more) from affiliate links - especially in a world where they are kind of gateway to the discovery - and don't have to do as much work on the infra side. This also aligns incentives for all three - companies, consumers, and middlemen, in a way it only happened with Google before this.

Definitely OpenAI. They’re not profitable and their core product is expensive to serve. They also have the disadvantage that their better models and features (eg agents, research, CoT, etc) are more expensive, but are better hooks to prove utility to new users - fundamentally they need a method to cheapen the cost of serving free users better features. Google can afford to see how it shakes out and the impact to OpenAI.

OpenAI already exploring and experimenting with different ad modalities privately. They’re also have a much better brand, so they might be able to avoid too much churn of customers.

Yeah, I agree. Almost mentioned in the post how I imagine an ad PM at OpenAI is jealous of an ad PM at Perplexity.

Some models will still trickle down; hell, better/cheaper hardware should enable to run hefty models available today, and they seem to be already okay-ish with such queries.

I hope so but we could also be staying in an eternal state of FOMO as the proprietary models keep getting marginally (or a lot) better.

Affiliate links are literally ads

Gemini can already sponsor other Google products like Google docs sheets and youtube

Interest rates at zero and there won't be any clients for these upstarts as people will be in bread lines from their worthless money.

Check out https://deep.ai lots of people who don't have $20/month to spend on a chatbot are happy to have ad impressions subsidize what model they get to use

And I'm betting they won't be shown as a clearly marked box that says "Ad". It'll be woven directly in the response like normal content.

ooo charge advertisers for % of time that their mcp context is influencing the response that gets generated. insiiidious. you wouldnt even know it was an ad.

Insightful article, thanks for writing/sharing!

I've already started getting results infiltrated by SEO but for AI. Deep research did return seemingly a top book when I was looking into Ansible. I independently verified it with my own searching in a few different places.

But the other recommendations seemed like crap and when I followed the sources they seemed like AI generated garbage for AI that I couldn't find doing my normal searching.

oAI rev exceeds $1b per month right now.

How are they better if they spam the user with ads?

still not profitable? All this revenue is burned on compute

I predict this won’t be the case. The switching cost to a non Ad LLM is too low for me to be bothered with an ad based LLM.

OpenAI must justify ads when its competitors are not sending ads. Why would they? OpenAI models must be so good that it should be worth dealing with ads compared to say Claude or DeepSeek.

Doesn’t have to be profitable atm

From my perspective, I'm so tired of ads being the main source of revenue on the internet. If they're added to chatgpt for example I will most definitely be moving to another that has no ads. Probably I don't represent the masses but I hate this rush to the bottom with adverts.

Ads are a way to get money from users who don’t want to pay with their money. You can’t beat free on price and crucially you can’t beat free on convenience - paying even 1 cent above free introduces complexity and friction.

Solve this and you’ll solve the ad problem, but I’m afraid it isn’t possible because money involves controls and regulations which you can’t weasel out of and not end up in jail.

Individual models are probably profitable because why not.

Not staying behind is the expensive part.

OTOH with the help of local models you should be able to post process any and all content on device to at least highlight, desensationalize if not outright remove quite a lot of those ads, at least until DRM folks lay their hands on it.

For sure. Needs to drain as much money as possible from Microsoft first. I approve!

Expensive part is providing the services at loss to get the biggest part of the market, which is the current state of affairs. At some point the market leader will emerge and it will price things according to the actual cost of running this thing + markup, and ALL efforts would be going into squeezing as much profit as possible from the leading position. At the same time usability and quality would not be priority anymore. We are enjoying the late-capitalism at it's peak here.

>yet people still use Google Search

Google search is widely acknowledged as drastically drying up in the last year or so, that's despite more worldwide internet usage.

I do what I can to waste OpenAI cash by getting the free version of chatgpt to write dirty limericks about Sam Altman.

I was watching a TV show on Prime for the past months. They introduced ads last month and I instantly returned to piracy for this specific show. I hope my main steaming service (for local content) doesn't get the same idea. I'd happily pay extra if they add 4k, but I don't like being extorted into paying (over 50%) more for the same service.

What about tiers like YouTube lite where you pay and you still see advertisement ?

How does that fit in your price model because to me it makes no sense at all yet people buy that. Same for Netflix tier with ads.

I'm just saying what Anthropic is saying: individual models are printing money. The problem is all the capital needed to get the next model before the previous ones are obsolete; investors capitalize the business because the future models are expected to print even more money, at least a few months ago. It's increasingly obvious that the new models won't print as much money as expected to justify the expenses, but if they all stopped training today they'd be swimming in cash in a couple years.

There's money to take, maybe, so why not take it.

>if they all stopped training today they'd be swimming in cash in a couple years.

If they stopped training, then the data cutoff date is one year farther each year? How do you make money from model which is stale on data and doesn't include any recent stuff?

Many people still use google search probably because the LLM response is at the top.

> The switching cost to a non Ad LLM is too low for me to be bothered with an ad based LLM.

Provided one with sufficient quality exists.

Would you consider sharing these somewhere?

> providing the services at loss to get the biggest part of the market

Would note that market share confers revenue, users and data. The last is uniquley valuable for LLM builders.

I do wonder whether we will switch back to ads or there is/will be a big switch to the subscription type model.

Would you trust output from OpenAI which is sponsered? I mean it's bad enough now in the ad space where they are increasingly trying to make the ads look more like content - imagine that in woven into your ChatGPT output?

The younger generation are quite used to subscription models - netflix, spotify, various gaming platforms etc. Perhaps access just becomes part of your internet access bundle.

Yes so what amount of quality are you willing to give up so that you won't be bombarded with ads?

Or, what extra money would you pay OpenAI to get a non ad powered LLM model?

Be careful what you wish for if you use anything from MS. Further enshittification will be mercyless.

That requires you to be able to notice the ads.

The thing is, ads don’t pay that much. Facebook’s ad revenue works out to about $50/user per year . I probably don’t like FB enough to pay $5/mo for it (and even if I did, all the people I interact with that make it useful wouldn’t) but something that’s a personal assistant? Easy.

It’s not hard to imagine ChatGPT just charging.

The problem with charging more for subscription is they have like 5 competitors who can give you the same thing, and charging more is giving them an open opportunity to trade revenue for market share if you undercut them.

I think they're realizing what most capitalists have realized - if you don't own the whole value chain, you don't own the value.

I bet Alex won't have a dropdown to switch to Claude Sonnet for very long.

The training data is full ads. For books, you have publisher-influenced rankings, SEO slop and promotional social media posts. It's GIGO, and has been that way from the start.

I suspect that ad powered LLMs will also dramatically sacrifice quality- they are a cost center suddenly, no reason to run a model with 10s or 100s of billions of parameters when some 500m thing will provide a minimally plausible scaffold for ad delivery.

Like everything else, most people won't notice a difference and prioritize free over paid.

I predict it will be sneaky enough and the ChatGPT brand is strong enough to take it. Your switching cost is low - but you’re likely a tech enthusiast who likes researching and trying alternatives. Most people aren’t like that. The one competitor with anywhere close consumer recognition is Gemini and I’m sure Google would love to push ads too. Maybe not yet as they’re in the reputation building phase, but if it makes money I’m fairly sure everyone will end up doing it.

Unless they all have ads, which is a good way to justify spending all that capex on training.

I think they'd inject ads during training (too). You and everyone cannot do that; Google can.

> if you don't own the whole value chain, you don't own the value.

Good rule. Just like using a service based AI instead of a self-hosted one if you are a developer or artist.

Their non-profit status may be an impediment to maximising profits.

IMHO a huge part of people choosing ChatGPT over Google for search is due to the absence of ads and other distractions.

Doing search with ChatGPT feels like doing research in a library setting whereas Google search feels like doing research in Times Square.

> Google's SERP is an ad-infested abomination that sometimes shows useful results, and yet people still use Google Search.

I've personally stopped doing that. I understand it's not a mainstream decision since most people don't even know what alternatives are there, but doesn't mean that in a couple of years google won't start to feel it.

1. They can't stop training

2. I don't trust them anyway that without training they are making money.

why would they inject ads during training?

Very good catch. For all my interest this space, it's embarrassing that I did not remotely see this coming...