• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, August 15, 2025

OpenAI's ChatGPT reached 700 million active users in August -- although not enough to sustain financial growth without ads, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, said during an interview this week on the Decoder podcast.

He does question the idea that subscriptions will stall, and spoke about how Netflix went to subscription tiers.

“I have become humble enough not to make crazy, extreme, long-term statements," he said, with reference to questions around ads, because there may be "a certain market where people aren’t willing to pay us, yet we want to offer the best, latest, and greatest,” he said. “Maybe that would be a place to consider other indirect forms of monetization.”

It appears the quest to own the AI for search, agents, commerce and other related markets has ignited all-out competition -- with companies throwing millions and even billions behind projects. It's not just Meta Platforms paying billions to poach top AI talent, but Microsoft and OpenAI too.

Microsoft is reaching deep into its coffers to recruit AI talent from Meta, reports Business Insider, citing internal documents.

Developers and researchers are at the top of the list. Competitive offers come from a dedicated budget that matches Meta’s already high compensation. Recruits must make a decision to take the position within 24 hours of the offer.

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI -- a division that combines AI products such as Copilot, Bing, GroupMe and Edge -- is heading recruitment efforts, along with former Meta executive Jay Parikh, among others.

Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, which had been a separate subsidiary of Google until the Alphabet company combined the two.

Microsoft documents viewed by Business Insider show that the company is making multimillion-dollar offers. Two people familiar with the process described to the news publication how multimillion-dollar on-hire bonuses for AI talent are becoming more common.

An organizational chart reportedly shows that Parikh's team leading CoreAI is full of former Meta executives.

There is a spreadsheet of Microsoft's Meta employees who are most desired by name, location, and position and includes tabs for teams and positions that Microsoft is targeting.

Some of those companies reportedly include Reality Labs, GenAI Infrastructure, and Meta AI Research.

There is a major stake in AI-related businesses. Business Insider in July published Microsoft's internal pay guidelines for engineers and researchers. The highest compensation package reached $408,000 in salary, with $1.9 million in on-hire stock awards, nearly $1.5 million in annual stock awards, and annual cash bonuses as high as 90%.

Google also is offering competitive compensation packages, including base salaries up to $340,000, to attract and retain top AI talent in the escalating tech talent wars. 

The data comes from recent reports and salary filings as a result of intense competition for skilled AI professionals.

Microsoft and Google have expertise in advertising, so after all this poaching of top talent it would seem surprising for OpenAI not to implement a tiered monetization model with a variety of options for ads similar to Netflix. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.