OpenAI is running ad tests inside ChatGPT. The company is exploring advertising as a revenue stream to subsidize free-tier access, a direct acknowledgment that API and subscription revenue alone may not sustain the product at scale.
The architecture matters: OpenAI claims ads will be clearly labeled, kept separate from generated answers, and built with privacy protections and user controls baked in. Whether those controls are meaningful or cosmetic is the central question the full post forces you to ask.
This is the first public signal that ChatGPT's free model could follow the Google and Meta playbook. Read the original for the specific language around answer independence, because the exact wording will tell you how much wiggle room OpenAI left itself.
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