It was the classic “take out the trash” move. On Friday, Jan. 16, late in the afternoon before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, OpenAI confirmed what industry insiders have long suspected: Ads are coming to ChatGPT.
This timing was calculated to soften the public relations impact, but the announcement marks a new shift in the generative AI economy. For years, OpenAI burned investor capital to fuel its user acquisition goals.
Now, facing an estimated $1.4 trillion in infrastructure costs over the next decade, the company is pivoting to a model very familiar to the media industry: subsidizing free access with advertising.
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