ChatGPT tests ads as a new era of AI begins

Two days after Google insisted there are no current plans for ads in its Gemini AI app, OpenAI announced Friday that it is starting to test ads in ChatGPT.

OpenAI CEO of applications Fidji Simo said in a blog post that ads will begin appearing at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers for free users and for Go subscribers (who pay $8 a month) in the U.S. in the coming weeks, opening an important new source of revenue for the high-flying startup which has been valued by investors at $500 billion.

It’s a moment many in tech have long viewed as inevitable: Running frontier AI models is brutally expensive, burning through staggering amounts of computing power, electricity, and GPUs. Advertising’s revenue stream is hard to resist. OpenAI expects to generate “low billions” of dollars in revenue this year, and more each year thereafter, the FT reported on Friday citing an unnamed person “close to the company.”

While Google has so far held back from putting ads in its standalone Gemini chatbot app, the company has incorporated ads into the AI Ov...