OpenAI Hasn’t Ruled Out Sticking Ads Into ChatGPT

Silicon Valley didn’t invent it, but it wears the tactic as if it did. Offer something for free (or very cheap), and then once people are hooked, kick the price up or start stackin’ up the advertisements.

Speaking with The Verge’s Alex Heath in a well-crafted interview (seriously, go check it out) with OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, we got a peek into a not-yet-set-in-concrete, possible future timeline in which ads could come to ChatGPT.

one possible future for ChatGpt

Like any good journalist, Heath digs in and ekes out a statement from a reluctant Turley on whether OpenAI could ever see a future in which a version of ChatGPT (the free version, I’d wager) shows advertisements to its users.

Here’s a snippet of the interview:

Turley: “So I actually don’t view the fact that the vast majority of our users are free as necessarily a liability. I really think it’s a funnel that we can build off of to build differentiated offerings for people who are willing to pay.

“There’s been many other iconic consumer subscriptions, like Netflix. I don’t know its exact subscriber base, but I think it’s much, much higher than ChatGPT.”

Heath: “Nick, you know Netflix also has ads.”

Turley: They do now. And look, since you’re really trying to get me to comment on ads, I have become humble enough not to make crazy, extreme, long-term statements on a question like that, because maybe there is a certain market where people aren’t willing to pay us, yet we want to offer the best, latest, and greatest.

“Maybe that would be a place to consider other indirect forms of monetization…. So I’m humble enough not to rule it out categorically, but we’d have to be very thoughtful and tasteful about it.”

Go check out more of the interview to hear more about where OpenAI sees ChatGPT heading over the next few years.