• by Laurie Sullivan , 5 hours ago

OpenAI has started offering a small group of advertisers the ability to run ads across ChatGPT with a budget commitment of $1 million each. The trial is expected to run for several weeks.

The ads, which officially roll out in February, appear in OpenAI's free version and its newly introduced Go plan.

The ad units are based on ad views rather than ad clicks, according to The Information, citing knowledgeable people.

This type of billing is expected to increase precision ad targeting and ad revenue to help offset the high costs associated with developing and running technology based on artificial intelligence (AI).  

OpenAI is expected to use contextual cues from user conversations to serve relevant ads. OpenAI blog posts have explained how these ads will appear as subtle suggestions in sidebars or as sponsored suggestions, so they do not interfere with the chatbot experience.

The ads are expected to appear at the bottom of ChatGPT’s responses. “To start, we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation,” according to the announcement.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once expressed a loathing for advertising during an interview at Harvard University. He called it a “last resort” and “unsettling.”

In November, the company said it expected to end 2025 with an annualized run rate of revenue of more than $20 billion, and Altman predicted revenue would grow to hundreds of billions by 2030, according to the Carnegie Investment Counsel blog.

But based on the growth projections, OpenAI has $1.4 trillion committed to data-center infrastructure projects during the next eight years, for starters.

Altman was recently questioned about these commitments on Brad Gerstner’s BG2 podcast. He pointed to multiple ways to increase revenue, but not ads. The growth, at the time, was expected to come from continued ChatGPT user subscriptions, integrating AI technology into consumer devices, and expansions in AI scientific research.

Despite OpenAI’s push into advertising for its AI-based chatbot, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said the company doesn’t have any plans to put ads in Gemini, Google’s AI assistant.

“It's interesting they've gone for that so early,” Hassabis was quoted in a post on X in reaction to ChatGPT ads. “Maybe they feel they need to make more revenue.”