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A year ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on his personal blog that “we are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”
(AGI here means “artificial general intelligence” – fully sentient artificial intelligence matching human cognition. It’s an idea normal people consider far-fetched and basically impossible because … it is.)
A year before that, Altman said at a Harvard event that “ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” before calling advertising “a last resort for us [OpenAI] for a business model.”
Turns out being close to god-level AI isn’t as profitable as it used to be.
What (little) we know about the state of advertising on ChatGPT
The Limits of Cold Email
As you’ve probably heard, ads are coming to ChatGPT. We don’t know too much about how it’s all going to work, but there are a few communications from OpenAI that shed some light.
Monday’s blog post spoke largely to the user experience. Ads will only be shown on the Free and Go ($8) subscription tiers, with the promise that they won’t affect answers, and that advertisers don’t have access to conversations, memory or other data. The effect is similar to Google search ads – organic content separated from ads with a “Sponsored” banner.
Honestly, this feels like a promise they can keep. Working advertising content into ChatGPT responses themselves would be a technical nightmare. Large language models work in ways we don’t fully understand (that’s scaled machine learning for you), and results are inherently unpredictable. Imaging enforcing brand safety standards for major logos with drunk-guy-at-the-bar-playing-darts content accuracy.
The privacy side, too, is probably legitimate. Yes, there’s a conspiratorial world where OpenAI could share de-anonymized chat history with advertisers. But what good would it do? Ingesting, synthesizing and categorizing that data would require a huge CRM/CDP lift for brands. We don’t need to have everything, we need to be able to use it – which is fine done anonymous, in-platform. And would advertisers even want that data, given what it would do for compliance with GDPR, CCPA and similar? That’s a liability I can live without.
For advertisers, we know basically nothing. There’s no way for most brands to access ChatGPT advertising at the moment: openai.com/advertisers/ is just a form. Big companies can partner directly with OpenAI, and there’s no telling if or when a self-serve (or even vaguely open marketplace) is coming, or what costs look like. Given the specificity of ChatGPT queries, though, one assumes ultra-premium pricing.
Hey, look – another 40-something guy in the advertising industry has opinions about Super Bowl commercials
Enough has been said about the “winners” and “losers” among this year’s $8 million-a-pop Super Bowl commercials. No matter how unsettling I find MrBeast, my thoughts there don’t matter much.
I do, however, think it’s worth emphasizing the AI-ness of it all. Twenty-three percent of this year’s Super Bowl ads featured AI, and online reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. AI “creative” (like Svedka’s uncanny valley robots), messaging (Genspark might have failed to read the room) and execution (AI.com suffered for uptime) all flopped, publicly.
It felt a little bit like the Dot Com Bowl. And given the fact that the space’s biggest software player is apparently down to its last resort …
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