Yes -- but both Google and Meta didn't start off as an advertising company - they started off providing a service a lot of people liked, and then eventually added ads to it. My assumption (somewhat implicit, admittedly) is that there's no reason OpenAI couldn't do the same. I can understand why that might be controversial, though.

But honestly, if OpenAI can't figure out ads given all their data and ability, they deserve to fail. :P

But OpenAI has more serious competition than those others did when they were coming up. That puts pressure on them to figure out ads and they dragged their feet getting started