Cancelled my subscription when I pay for it like I always do. I will NOT be renewing this month.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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They're currently burning more than a billion USD each month, it's fully understandable that they are trying to earn more money. I seriously doubt that ad revenue will even come close to what they need to financially survive.
Let's hope so!
I can see it easily making that much money in ads. LLMs have been making people fall in love, superglueing the peperoni on pizzas, making mustard gas at home. The ads won't be in the form of a banner or a pop up, but in the responses. Drive to target.
I once accidentally made mustard gas at home trying to unclog a drain. I had bleach and ammonia on hand, and I ended up sleeping outside on the sofa on the porch of the main house after the hell I went through with my throat.
Surely things like product comparisons are a great target for ads. But still, the typical ad revenue per user is probably significantly lower than the cheapest ChatGPT subscription.
ChatGPT subscriptions are significantly cheaper than what they cost the company anyway.
I have this scary vision where they somehow do a more or less successful IPO and gain 100 billion or more. Than this idiocy will never stop.
Good thing I don't use it.
Good thing I'm not in US.
I used it for work to paraphrase individual grafs when doing rewrites of press releases so that I could avoid unintentional plagiarism (it's sort of a grind where that can slip in). But I have no purpose for it now.
- doesn't want to unintentionally plagiarize
- uses the plagiarizism machine
We all know it's going to be bad. In fact, I expect hilarious results.
Ask for pizza recipes, get an ad for Elmer's Glue.
Surely the most obvious business model is blackmail of the users given the sensitive information they've handed over?
LMAO. Good. Couldn’t be happier about it!
I wonder if this is going to affect all those companies that have ChatGPT-powered customer agents.
It would be very funny to receive an ad for a competitor while trying to get help for something from the company that makes it.
They're unaffected as they pay for the OpenAI API (there's no free API) which is a separate product to ChatGPT. This change only affects ChatGPT, and I think only the free version.
Lmao
As far as I know, this is only for the free version of ChatGPT. It costs a lot of money to run, and they're still not profitable, so it makes sense that they want to monetize the free version. The other option is to completely shut down the free version and only have the paid one.
As far as I can tell, the paid one also loses then plenty of money (possibly more than the free one?)
organizations buying by the dozens is good for openai and it shows they can get cash flow vs free users that are only taking up resources.
it's probably going to be like youtube
OpenAI has a snowball's chance in hell of surviving. LLMs cost a lot of compute. They're burning through cash. Operating costs are more than double revenue. Their net operational losses are about $1 million USD every 40 minutes.
And somehow they're trying to put half a trillion USD into building more datacentres to make even more advanced models, which will be even more compute intensive.
Meanwhile, as venture capital has been committed to a whole series of AI companies and data centres, venture capital is dying up. Nobody has gotten a payout yet, since there's no path to profitability for any of these companies.
And it's coming to a head this fall, when OpenAI needs to pay their suppliers for the expansion they're building, and there's no reason to believe they'll be able to raise enough more investment to cover their costs.
It doesn't even take OpenAI failing, either. There's so much debt ("leverage") and circular cashflow going on in this space, between the AI companies, data centres, computer hardware manufacturers, and construction companies, that any one of them failing could cause cascading failures, like dominoes. Worse than the '08 financial crash, most likely.
So no. It's not going to be like YouTube. YouTube is cheap to run, compared to LLMs.
And the worst part of it all: LLMs aren't even very good! It creates an illusion of productivity, but it's all bullshit, either doing a shitty job, or taking more time to prompt fondle than it would have taken to do the job by hand, or building up tech debt that's going to make massive projects unmaintainable.
It has some use cases, sure. I use it almost daily, tbh. But only because someone else is footing the bill. It doesn't produce nearly enough value to justify its costs.