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In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the possibility that his company would ever have to feed advertisements into its chatbots, calling it a desperate move.Last resort for us as a business model“
As it turns out, the billionaire may have overestimated the amount of money people were willing to spend each month to access ChatGPT. Paid subscriber growth in major markets has slowed as OpenAI spends billions of dollars every quarter, raising concerns over the company’s potential inability to turn things around before it’s too late.
And as the competition at Anthropic and Google continued to make massive progress in their efforts, Altman announced an internal “code red,” announcing late last year that ChatGPS was finally getting ads.
OpenAI’s competitors saw this reversal as a golden opportunity to strike. anthropic Released a series of Super Bowl commercials Altman’s deal on ads this week was openly skewered — without naming the company, cleverly — to the bid. Establish relationships with users Those who aren’t thrilled with an ad-packed chatbot experience.
“Ads are coming to AI.” reads the tagline of the ads. “But not to Claude.”
It’s always a bad sign when someone insists that they’re not crazy and really laughing. so when Altman announced on He thinks the ads are “funny” and he “laughed” at it – before posting a long article about how horrifically inappropriate they are – it was an unintentional masterclass in corporate insecurity.
“But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so obviously dishonest,” he wrote. “Our most important principle for ads says we absolutely will not do that; we will obviously never run ads the way Anthropic portrays them.”
Altman angrily accused the company of “doublespeak” and “use of misleading advertising to criticize theoretically misleading advertisements that are not real.”
The CEO also called users who spend $20 a month for a cloud subscription “rich people” – a bizarre characterization, especially considering his multibillion-dollar net worth.
“We’re glad they do and so are we, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to the billions of people who can’t pay for a subscription,” Altman wrote.
He also accused Anthropic of trying to become a “totalitarian company” that wants to “control what people do with AI,” although there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is. The pot is calling the kettle black.
It’s a messy and unusually public outburst that highlights how the AI race, once fought behind closed doors in board rooms and through carefully worded press releases, is entering the public consciousness.
Altman’s frustration perfectly illustrates how AI companies have pushed themselves into a corner. They can either charge huge monthly fees to cover their losses and reassure scared investors that they can, in fact, provide revenue on their balance sheet – or scare away users through annoying ads, like every generation of new platforms before them.
Although OpenAI has not yet decided on a way to implement advertising for its blockbuster chatbot initial screenshot The company made a splash during its announcement late last year, indicating that free-tier users will likely realize that the company is trying to sell them something. The example ad shown covers a significant portion of the mobile screen – almost half.
It remains to be seen how users will react once the ad goes live. Will they immediately switch to the cloud or an ad-free competitor like Google’s Gemini, or will they be willing to stick with it to avoid paying more than they pay for Netflix every month?
The AI race is bound to drag on as companies like OpenAI continue to convince their customers and investors that their existence – and huge expense – is justified and that their technology is worth the trouble in the first place. Given the recent tech selloff and nervousness among investors, and the diminishing performance gains with each new AI model release, this still seems to be an open question.
In short, Altman might say he was amused by Anthropic’s latest slight, but given his heated rhetoric, the gloves are beginning to come off.
“‘I laughed until I stopped laughing.'” A Reddit user said jokingly.
More on Altman: Sam Altman Says Oops, He Accidentally Made the New Version of ChatGPT Worse Than the Last One
