I work at OpenAI and I'm happy to deny this hypothesis.

Our goal for the router (whether you think we achieved it or not) was purely to make the experience smoother and spare people from having to manually select thinking models for tasks that benefit from extra thinking. Without the router, lots of people just defaulted to 4o and never bothered using o3. With the router, people are getting to use the more powerful thinking models more often. The router isn't perfect by any means - we're always trying to improve things - but any paid user who doesn't like it can still manually select the model they want. Our goal was always a smoother experience, not ad injection or cost optimization.

Hi! Thank you for the clarification. I was just saying it might be possible in the future (in a way you can determine how much compute - which model - a specific query needs today as well). And the experience has definitely improved w router so kudos on that. I don't know what the final form factor of ads would be (i imagine it turning out to be a win win win scenario than say you show ads at the expense of quality. This is a google level opportunity to invent something new) just that it seems from the outside you guys are preparing for monetization by ads given the large userbase you have and virtually no competition at chatgpt usage level.