Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, OpenAI, may start displaying ads, according to the CFO, Sarah Friar, in an interview with the Financial Times.
Friar told the newspaper it’s weighing an ads business model, with plans to be “thoughtful” about when and where ads appear. In a follow-on statement, Friar stressed it has “no active plans to pursue advertising,” but it seems clear the idea is on the table. (The FT’s reporting highlighted a recent high-profile ad hire: Shivakumar Venkataraman, formerly of Google.)
According to a report by TechCrunch, even though the ChatGPT maker has so far relied on subscriptions to support the development of its generative AI tools, the cost of making and serving these models is eye-wateringly high, and there are only so many billions of dollars that investors may be willing to fork into the fire.
Meanwhile, in a recent fireside chat at Harvard Business School, after being asked if the company might adopt ads to broaden access options, OpenAI founder, Sam Altman, said it would be a “last resort … I’m not saying OpenAI would never consider ads, but I don’t like them in general, and I think that ads-plus-AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me.”
