OpenAI’s Ad Gamble: Have We Learned Nothing from Google?

"We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful advertising. Whenever someone pays for something, we will make it clear to our users. Advertisements should not be an annoying interruption."

Last week, OpenAI announced the inclusion of ads into some tiers of its ChatGPT service. You'd be forgiven for thinking the quote above was from that announcement, but it's actually what Google said about their advertising program back in 2004.

Few of us today would think that set of commitments by Google have aged well over the last 20+ years, and this is why I find it very hard to take the promises OpenAI is making about slipping advertising in alongside ChatGPT outputs at face value.

Less than two years ago Sam Altman was reported as saying, "I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model", so perhaps this is a clear indicator that in the face of Claude's advance in the business space, Gemini starting to rock for the consumer, and Microsoft 365 Copilot finally delivering what was initially promised, OpenAI is getting to its last resort plan.

Clearly, AI businesses need to make money. But filling the experience with advertising to plug a gap created by a basic imbalance of the business model's economics doesn't seem sustainable.

We have an industry largely focused on hooking more people to create more slop rather than the stated aim of improving access for everyone to create more value for individuals, businesses, and society.

For those using AI for the right things (the types of workloads I help businesses with every day), the business case for paying for it is abundantly clear. But for a family member who recently showed me her ChatGPT chat log that read more like a Google search history while she cackled at AI-generated cartoon animal shorts, it isn't.

If ads become the revenue driver, our data will eventually become the currency, just as they did when we allowed the economics of search to turn in the wrong direction with Google. It isn't that these promises are necessarily intentionally disingenuous, but we now have the history to understand that this is a ship that moves with great inertia.

The AI tech leaders talk a good talk about their focus on bettering our world, but their actions suggest a scary inability or fundamental unwillingness to learn the lessons of how so many aspects of the Internet of today have massive negative externalities across many parts of our society.

I'm not sure this is a good move either for OpenAI or for the future of this big AI experiment. What's your take?

🖼️ from OpenAI's announcement showing ad placement

First posted on Linkedin 01/20/2026 -> View Linkedin Post Here