ChatGPT urgently needs its users to start paying money. Solution: put ads on them

It was inevitable. OpenAI has confirmed that is going to start testing ads on ChatGPT. The test will begin in the United States with users of free plans, those who have ChatGPT Plus, Pro or Enterprise are exempt for the moment. It is a movement that marks the beginning of a reality that was seen coming: The user experience of free AIs is about to get worse.

All for the AGI. Through your X profileOpenAI has shared what those ads will look like and is striking in the heading of its “advertising principles.” Here they say their mission is “to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of publicity always supports that mission and makes AI more accessible.” how he jokes Pedro Domingos in Xit seems that the AGI was actually “Ad-Generated Income”, that is, “Income generated by advertising.”

Where I said I say…. The AGI is becoming the excuse for everything. To find the true reasons behind this decision, it is enough to look at OpenAI numbers. Or also we can go back to 2024when Sam Altman said that ads on ChatGPT are “the last resort for our business model.” Saying that everything is part of a plan for the benefit of humanity is better than admitting that the AI ​​race is very expensive and OpenAI desperately needs to monetize its AI.

This sounds familiar to us. The situation is quite reminiscent of the case of Netflix, which In 2020 he flatly refused to advertising, stating that it was a way to “exploit users” to two years later launch your plan with ads. Since then the streaming experience began to deteriorate and everything indicates that we are at the beginning of exactly the same thing happening with AI.

Advertising as punishment. Before, ads were a way to generate income. Today they also function as a pressure tool to push users to pay a subscription. This is what we find on YouTube or Spotify, where the bombardment of ads is constant, repetitive and very intrusive. We pay to end the torture.

Objective: subscriptions. ChatGPT has 1.8 billion users, but the reality is that only 5% are subscribed to one of their payment plans. How to increase this figure? If we don’t subscribe ourselves, maybe a few ads will convince us. OpenAI has been the first, but there are also rumors that Google will integrate ads into Gemini. The AI ​​party does not pay for itself, it is a matter of time.

There is a loophole. If the big chatbots turn their free versions into a minefield of ads, we will always have the option of use local models such as DeepSeek, Mistral, Llama or ChatGPT itself. Here we get rid of token limits, queues and also ads. The bad part is that the performance is usually lower than the cloud and it also has fewer integrations. Time will tell if they end up being a better alternative.

Image | OpenAI

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