Not a typo.
The addition of advertising to ChatGPT, announced this week, feels like a watershed moment. It’s not like it will change very much immediately - they’ve made all the right noises about how it will only add little panels alongside the conversation - but its a pretty slippery slow, isn’t it?
Having watched as Google changed from clean and minimal results, perhaps with a parallel column of ads, into the full blown mess that it is with everything being paid results or SEO slop, it’s easy to see where the ChatGPT-with-ads trajectory might end up.
More than anything, it seems desperate. Altman previously called ads a “last-resort”. Are we supposed to read this as reality beginning to bite? What’s happened to the countless billions of frothing AI money? Did it ever exist?
For now, they do offer ad-free tiers. I wouldn’t bank on them sticking around forever though. The undeniable truth of advertising is that, however much you hate it, it makes money. OpenAI, meanwhile, does not…