According to people familiar with the matter, OpenAI plans to launch advertising testing in ChatGPT starting this week, marking the official entry of this popular conversational artificial intelligence product into the advertising monetization stage. These ads will appear as "clearly labeled" and placed in a separate area below the conversation window, separate from the content of the user's chat with ChatGPT.
According to CNBC, sources close to the project said that OpenAI expects advertising revenue to account for less than half of the company’s overall revenue in the long term, with advertising being only part of its business model but not all of it. In fact, the discussion surrounding "whether AI should be used in advertising" has heated up in the industry recently: competitor Anthropic previously publicly joked in a Super Bowl ad that "advertising is coming to AI", but claimed that its own chatbot Claude would not display ads, thus secretly taking aim at OpenAI. However, the ad was softened when it actually aired during game broadcasts, after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly criticized the ad as "clearly dishonest."
According to the arrangements announced by OpenAI, the advertising test subjects are logged-in ChatGPT users, including completely free users and lower-priced Go subscriber users. The company also emphasized that it will “keep the content of conversations between users and ChatGPT closed to advertisers,” meaning advertisers cannot directly see users’ specific chat records. However, OpenAI also stated that these ads will still be optimized based on the criteria of "most helpful to users", which means that the system will use certain signals to target advertising, but will not affect the conversation answers itself given by ChatGPT.
In addition to ad testing, Altman told employees in an internal memo seen by CNBC that OpenAI plans to launch an upgraded chat model this week, following the release of a more advanced version of its AI coding agent Codex a few days ago. He also said that ChatGPT has "returned to monthly growth of more than 10%", showing that its user base is accelerating again after a brief slowdown. As of October last year, data released by OpenAI showed that ChatGPT’s weekly active users had reached 800 million.