OpenAI is getting ready to serve ads inside ChatGPT, a long-expected move that could turn the company’s popular chatbot into a bigger moneymaker.
The San Francisco company said on Friday that over the next several weeks it would begin testing ads in the free version of the online chatbot and a low-cost version called ChatGPT Go, which costs $8 a month.
The new advertising program is part of the company’s wider effort to boost revenue as it considers a public stock offering. OpenAI is also building products for businesses in areas like computer coding, health care, finance and the law.
OpenAI, which charges subscription fees for its ChatGPT chatbot and other software, reached $13 billion in revenue last year and expects to triple that this year, according to a person with knowledge of the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But the company is also spending at an enormous rate. It plans to spend $115 billion between 2025 and 2029.
Most of that money will be spent on the cloud computing services and computer data centers needed to build artificial intelligence technologies and serve them up to people and businesses around the world.
A vast majority of ChatGPT users rely on the free version of the chatbot, and adding advertising to it could help OpenAI close some of the gap on that spending.
In a blog post, the company said that when ChatGPT responds to questions, its answers would not fundamentally change, nor would the content of the ads affect them.
“People trust ChatGPT for many important and personal tasks, so as we introduce ads, it’s crucial we preserve what makes ChatGPT valuable in the first place,” the blog post read. “That means you need to trust that ChatGPT’s responses are driven by what’s objectively useful.”
Chatbots are not as conducive to ads as traditional web pages or search engines. Chatbots generate prose rather than a list of blue links that can easily be expanded with internet addresses from advertisers. But OpenAI has long experimented with various ways of delivering ads in ways designed to be unobtrusive.
OpenAI said that personal data and conversations in chatbots would not be sold to advertisers. The company said ads would be tailored to what people are looking for when they query the chatbot and what they have looked for in the past, which is a common approach to online advertising. But users will be able to turn off ad personalization.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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