ChatGPT is a polarizing tool in 2026. Some love it. Some hate it. Personally, I’ve found it to be a useful tool for a variety of things.
But few things are quite as nauseating as the AI bro grift that AGI is just around the corner, and that soon we’ll all be out of jobs thanks in no small part to OpenAI’s innovations.
At one time, I could have bought that. Generative AI is, arguably, one of the most fascinating tools of this decade. Love it or hate it.
But the cracks in OpenAI are beginning to show.
The company has never been profitable and is, in fact, projected to lose around $14 BILLION in 2026 alone, potentially running out of money completely by mid-2027.
Now, OpenAI is putting ads in its free and lower tier memberships for ChatGPT. Taking Sam Altman’s own words at face value, where does that leave OpenAI?
The decision to add ads to ChatGPT
To quite a bit of backlash, OpenAI announced in January that the free and “Go” tiers of ChatGPT would begin showing advertisements to U.S. based users.
These advertisements, according to OpenAI, would be clearly labeled and separate from ChatGPT’s own responses.
Ads will, supposedly, be shown when relevant and will not (again supposedly) influence responses.
This is a departure from OpenAI’s previous ad-free model which made ChatGPT accessible for all, albeit with weaker and less capable models or at lower limits.
Ads have been a universally-disliked method of monetization over the years. Ads are intrusive, obtrusive, annoying and way too common.
At this point, I’d argue that most of us have some level of ad fatigue.
But, it’s hard to argue that this is a way for OpenAI to generate some fast cash.
Fortunately, the higher paid tiers of ChatGPT will not have ads. At least for now.
This was supposed to be a “last resort”
During an event at Harvard University in 2024, Sam Altman said “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me.”
Agreed, Sam. It’s incredibly unsettling.
Ads have historically been inextricably linked with user tracking and invasion of privacy. Data is money these days.
For many, ChatGPT knows more about them than they know about themselves.
It knows their interests, their moods, their connections, and much more. Advertisers would love to have access to that data. Love to.
This seems like a match made in Hell.
Altman went on to say “I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us as a business model.”
A last resort as a business model.
And now ChatGPT has ads.
What does that say about OpenAI’s future?
Is OpenAI now at “last resort” levels? Or did Sam not really mean what he said in 2024? Those are the questions of the hour in my mind.
Either Altman didn’t mean that ads are a last resort business plan. Or he did and OpenAI is now having to resort to ads.
Neither is a good option, in my opinion.
Circling the drain
Money in the AI space has a very circular motion to it where OpenAI is concerned. Oracle, Microsoft, AMD, NVIDIA, Coreweave and OpenAI are all locked in a circular dance of monetary exchange to the point that it feels more than a little odd.
As Barron’s succinctly puts it, “The circles remind some on Wall Street of the wash trades between venture capital-backed start-ups before the first Internet bubble burst 20 years ago – or the guy who asks you lend him a $20 bill so he can buy you a beer.”
Indeed.
Talk of an AI bubble seems more relevant than ever.
I’m no economist, and I don’t play one on TV. And nothing I say here or anywhere else is even remotely financial advice.
But I have to wonder, just how stable is all of this? Circular financing raises eyebrows, for good reason.
We knew that OpenAI has been leaking money like a broken water main for years. Now they’re adding ads to ChatGPT. Couple that with this pattern of circular funding between NVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft and others…
It’s rightly leading people to ask questions.
Are we looking at a bubble? And if so, just how bad will the pop be?
Popping the bubble
If indeed there is an AI bubble, and in my non-economist opinion there is, it’s only a matter of time until it pops. Contrary to what many in the “AI bro” camp might argue, the popping of the bubble doesn’t mean AI goes away.
Some have tried to argue that there’s no bubble on the basis that “AI is here to stay.” And I agree. It is. The genie is out of the bottle.
Even if OpenAI, Antropic, X, Gemini and the rest were to vanish tomorrow, models have already been trained and open sourced. It’s out there.
But just like the pop of the Dot Com bubble didn’t mean the end of the Internet, the pop of the AI bubble doesn’t mean the end of AI.
What I hope it does mean, however, is a solid recentering of priorities. Countless billions of dollars have been thrown into the wood chipper of AI chasing the promise of a technological utopia led by AGI. But promises have been made, changed and broken over and over.
The consumer electronics market has been absolutely devastated by AI companies gobbling up all the DRAM they can get their hands on, making affordable storage and memory a nice… well, memory.
I’d love for that to change. Quickly.
Not great either way
Even if adding ads to ChatGPT isn’t a sign of financial trouble for OpenAI, I still consider it a net negative for AI users as a whole.
Right now, ads are only being added to the free and “Go” tiers of ChatGPT. But now that OpenAI is adding ads, my fear is this will given Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Antropic and X an excuse to do the same.
Apple has been a prime offender in terms of anti-consumer practices. Soldering components, preventing repairs. Serializing parts so that unofficial repairs aren’t possible. And so on. But, for better or worse, as goes Apple so goes the rest of the industry.
Apple’s move to solder RAM gave Dell and Lenovo the permission to do the same in some of their machines.
I expect we’ll see other chatbots start pushing ads in the not too distant future.
Now that OpenAI’s doing it, why not right? Why shouldn’t Google put ads in Gemini? Where are users going to go? ChatGPT?
Ads in ChatGPT in 2026 feel like the soldered RAM of 2016.
Not great.
Time will tell how it all plays out.
But as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia, and Obi-Wan were all fond of saying in the Star Wars films, “I have a bad feeling about this.”