OpenAI is beginning to test advertising on its popular ChatGPT platform, potentially opening up a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue opportunity.
The company announced the move on Friday.
Given the computing power required by AI tools, OpenAI is spending much of the war chest derived from venture capital and investments from Microsoft and other backers building out data centers and adding staff. The company took an early lead in the AI race against a number of established Big Tech rivals, including Google, Meta and Amazon. It has repeatedly raised money, with a report in recent weeks indicating it was looking to summon another $100 billion at a valuation of $830 billion. It has been mentioned as a potentially historic IPO candidate coming to the stock market soon.
The privately held start-up was on track to hit a $20 billion revenue run rate in 2025, CEO Sam Altman has said. With ChatGPT making history as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer tech products in history, advertising has been expected as a way to leverage that vast scale. Last fall, OpenAI said its large-language model was drawing 800 million users. More recently, the company rolled out a health care offering designed to cater to the estimated 230 million weekly users coming to ChatGPT with health care queries.
Along with the ad news, the company also says expanding a subscription offering, ChatGPT Go, to the U.S. and other countries. Go, which costs $8 a month, as well as the free, base version of ChatGPT, will be the only areas where the company will place advertising. (It operates higher-tier subscription platforms for business customers.) In its announcement, the company also stressed its commitment to not let advertising influence the results given by ChatGPT.
“People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” the company wrote in a blog post. “That means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising. You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers. ”
In a post on X, Altman said the company would “keep your conversations private from advertisers.” He invoked the ad business on Instagram, calling it a place where “I’ve found stuff I like that I otherwise never would have.” In that spirit, he said, “we will try to make ads ever more useful to users.”