Sam Altman’s ‘Last Resort’ for ChatGPT Looks a Lot Like Facebook

Having burned through about $8 billion of cash in 2025, OpenAI seems in desperate need of revenue. Now it’s jumping into what Chief Executive Sam Altman described in 2024 as the company’s last resort: showing ads in ChatGPT. Doing this so soon after that dismissal speaks to the financial pressures his company is under.1

Investors will cheer at the effort to beef up its top line and compete with ad king Google, which is preparing to run adverts in its chatbot too, and online advertising is one of the most successful businesses of all time. It has kept large swathes of the internet free and dynamic. But it has also been socially damaging, incentivizing rage bait, misinformation and other toxic byproducts of our smartphones. OpenAI says it won’t go the same way. I have doubts about a company that has taken a few U-turns in its lifetime.