Less than two years ago, Sam Altman said

> I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services, but if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.

So, is this OpenAI announcing they're strapped for cash?

No, I suspect that "I kind of think of ads as a last resort" was doublespeak for "ads are coming eventually".

I would tend to think of someone like him as a person who uses words to achieve a specific goal, rather than someone who speaks whatever is truly on their mind. Whether those words are lies or truth or somewhere in between is irrelevant; what matters to them is the outcome.

It's likely a waste of time trying to unpick the meaning, because there is none. "But Sam Altman said..." to me has about as much value as "ChatGPT told me...".

Feels to me like idealism crossing into realism. OpenAI could be the next Google, or the next Facebook, or the next… I don't know, Netflix?

All those companies (and many other large tech companies) have discovered the same arbitrage that older media companies discovered decades ago, which is that we, on the average, are much more willing to pay with attention than with money, even where money would have been the better choice.

Advertising continues to be one of the most powerful business models ever invented, and I don't think that's changing any time soon.

Well - I think the writing was on the wall when they announced they were going to be for-profit. Slippery slope and all that, but I’m sure some of this is because they’ve been giving out free tokens for years.

That's not how I read that sentence at all. Maybe I've just been speaking VC for too long.

What he meant was: "I'm going to get everybody in the world access to great services. Doing so means monetizing somehow. Ads will be the last way I chose to do that, but I will if it's the only way I can figure out how to achieve that goal."

I also remember him saying that on ig lex friedman podcast. In my opinion, they will only try this on a handful of users and see if it works out or not, just like Anthropic removed Claude code from the pro plan for a very small percentage of users just for testing purposes. It will all boil down to how people respond to the ads rollout.

The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.

The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.

The key part of that quote was "everybody in the world". The ads are their way of sustaining the low end of the access.

Or, Sam did not speak the truth back then, and always had ads in his mind. I think that was the strategy from the get go.

For somebody so smart, surrounding by people so brilliant, in the very heart of the Silicon Valley, and somehow not learning from the 1 startup that become one of the largest corporations even, namely Google, is a pretty dumb move.

Context : Brin/Page said the same, they didn't like nor want ads, only if it was the last resort. Well, guess which World we all live in now.

Who can resist the temptation of profit? One always has to make money

Oh no ... Sweet summer child. Whatever the revenue is, whatever profit there is, whatever cash buffer any corporate has, you can be sure of one thing: they need this to go up and to the right...

It became almost a perfect science to optimize your behavior: this is why you end up, bit by bit with enshitiffied products all around you where basically the pain of using that product is just at the threshold of you actually bashing it against the wall.

ChatGPT is just one of them, like Google search, your TV serving ads or ...

"last resort" doing some heavy lifting in that quote.

Sam Altman is the guy fired for lying. Why believe what he claims?

Charitably, it seems that we have yet to find, as a species/society, anything more effectively profitable than ads. I cannot blame those who come to this conclusion so long as no more powerful and proven motivator yet exists. I hate it, but I understand.

more like "Sam Altman said"

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I think you're missing that Sam Altman is very smart. If OpenAI really were on the verge of becoming massively profitable due to their next-gen AI, he would not want that information leaking. If Sam Altman acts differently in the world where profits are on the horizon, that information leaks prematurely. Thus, he has to act as if OpenAI is strapped for cash, whether or not it is.

The keyword is "glamorization": https://www.lesswrong.com/w/consistent-glomarization