OpenAI, still running in the red on its books, announced Friday that it will expand its lowest-tier subscription option, ChatGPT Go, to markets around the world, including the United States. In what is surely completely unrelated news, OpenAI also announced that it will start testing sponsored product placement and advertisements in ChatGPT’s free and Go tier subscriptions.
ChatGPT Go isn’t a new price point for the paid version of ChatGPT, but it was previously quite limited in its reach. It originally launched in India this summer, but OpenAI has been expanding the option, and it’s now available in 170 countries. Starting today, that list of available countries includes the US, making it the cheapest available subscription plan for the chatbot at $8 per month. The plan bumps up the caps on messaging limits, file uploads, and image generation placed on free users, as well as providing expanded access to the company’s latest model.
It’ll also get ads. According to OpenAI, both Go subscribers and free users will soon start seeing ads in their conversations, which the company claims will be done “so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay.” Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will be free from ads—at least for the time being.
OpenAI claims that advertisements will be “clearly labeled” and displayed in a separate part of the chat from a user’s conversation with the chatbot. The company also said that it will “keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers,” and reassured users that “your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers.” It’s probably worth bookmarking that one to revisit in a couple of years.
Advertisers also won’t be able to influence answers displayed in chat, according to OpenAI. While advertisements will be personalized by default, the company said users will be able to opt out of this and turn off personalization for ads at any time. Users under 18 also won’t see advertisements, and ads won’t be placed next to “sensitive or regulated topics” like health, mental health, or politics.
OpenAI is clearly doing its best to very carefully position the ad rollout as something that won’t be invasive, which makes sense given how poorly users responded when they mistook an integration for making purchases through Target’s online store via ChatGPT for an advertisement. But it’s also clear that the company can’t really afford to slow-roll this, as it needs to figure out how to turn a profit sooner rather than later. The company is still projected to be deeply underwater by the turn of the decade, and with so much of the economy currently betting on AI turning into a money-printing machine, investor patience is going to start wearing thin quickly.
Most people aren’t paying for AI tools like ChatGPT, and there is currently little in the way of a roadmap to turning a profit that doesn’t bank on a world-upending technological breakthrough that very well may never come. It’s hard to imagine ads will turn that around, but OpenAI launching this experiment with lower-tier subscriptions and ad-based models suggests the company knows it needs to figure out how to at least appear like it will make money eventually.
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