OpenAI is weighing a decision to implement ads in ChatGPT, the company told the Financial Times. Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer, said that the company is thinking about putting ads in ChatGPT to support its costs, which would likely be for non-paying customers.
Friar told the paper that there are no active plans to move into advertising just yet. She did say that if ads eventually end up in the app, then the company will be thoughtful about where it places them.
In the interview, Friar told FT that she and OpenAI's chief product officer, Kevin Weil, have experience when it comes to advertising. She pointed out that the CPO came over from Instagram and knows how to implement ads, which could be useful knowledge for OpenAI.
The AI company also recently hired Shivakumar Venkataraman from Google's search advertising team. This could further help AI to make money via ads. An unnamed source who spoke to the FT said that Sam Altman, head at OpenAI, is warming up to the idea of deploying ads.
Currently, OpenAI monetizes its AI through its API, which lets third-party developers deploy its models to their apps. There is also the premium version of ChatGPT that individuals and businesses can purchase for a fairly hefty sum.
Many of the company's users don't pay a penny but are restricted to how many prompts they can send to GPT-4o before getting pushed onto GPT-4o mini, a less resource-intensive model that still performs very well.
For anybody dreading the idea of ads in ChatGPT, Friar says ads may not land just yet because there is low-hanging fruit the company can exploit to raise money, but eventually, we should expect to see ads.
Source: Financial Times
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