After more than three years of explosion, artificial intelligence is entering a stage of facing the business problem directly. As the cost of model training, data center operation and infrastructure expansion increases rapidly, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) is said to be considering a breakthrough step of displaying ads in chats with AI chatbots.
OpenAI has begun testing many options to display sponsored content inside ChatGPT. Some engineering groups are refining the AI model in the direction of prioritizing sponsored information when users ask questions related to shopping or product suggestions. For example, when users ask about cosmetics, ChatGPT can display mascara suggestions accompanied by advertising content.
In recent weeks, OpenAI is said to have built simulations illustrating many different ways to integrate advertising.
Some test samples display sponsored information in the side bar, accompanied by clear notifications for users to recognize what the advertising content is.
Along with that, the company also seeks to minimize the feeling of being bothered, because advertising associated with personal conversations can make users uncomfortable or worried about privacy.
In fact, OpenAI is no exception in the race to burn money for AI. Google, Meta, Amazon and many other AI companies are spending billions of USD each year, but the path to profitability is still unclear.
Chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, despite having a huge number of users, still mainly rely on subscription packages, which are difficult to compensate for increasingly large infrastructure costs.
Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT has grown at a rare rate, currently reaching over 900 million weekly active users.
OpenAI aims to raise this number to 2.6 billion by 2030. That scale makes ChatGPT an attractive platform for advertisers, especially when the company holds a huge data warehouse from detailed user conversations.
Although CEO Sam Altman once publicly lowered his advertising ambitions, OpenAI has recently recruited many veterans in the field of digital advertising and developed new shopping features.
This shows that the company is preparing for the possibility of entering the advertising market, which is currently dominated by Amazon, Google and Meta with nearly 60% of global market share, excluding China.
However, the timing and form of advertising in ChatGPT are still questionable. OpenAI has not confirmed the official plan, and the deployment, if possible, will take place cautiously. Because with conversational AI, the boundary between useful suggestions and offensive advertising is extremely fragile.
