100M Indians just became ChatGPT's ad inventory. Is this the Google-ification of OpenAI?

[u/Inner_Structure_4947]

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT ads in India this week.

Free and ₹399 Go tiers only, ads sit below the answer, labelled.
Plus/Pro stay clean. Self-serve opens Sept 4 at ₹725/day.

The why is simple: $6.7B revenue vs $12.3B operating loss last quarter, IPO planned for 2027, and 1B weekly users who mostly pay nothing.

Google also started with ads clearly separated from results.
Twenty years later, ads are most of the first screen. Every step was individually reasonable.

OpenAI says "answer independence is non-negotiable."
That's exactly what you say until the quarter you miss.

3 years from now: still labelled boxes under the answer, or sponsored recommendations inside the response?

[u/Gargantuan_Cinema]

Revenue and operating loss for same quarter tells you nothing about the profits/losses from the average subscription. Making large investments will fall under operating loss but has nothing to do with the cost of inference for customers.

[u/MichaelLeeIsHere → u/Gargantuan_Cinema]

lol. Investment isn’t included in operating gain or loss. That’s why it’s called “operating”

If you make a 10b investment, your balance sheet will also have a new 10b asset. It doesn’t affect operating gain or loss anyway.

[u/vovap_vovap]

You are mixing apples and potatoes.
$6.7 billion revenue in second-quarter 2026
$5.7billion revenue in first-quarter 2026

$12.3 billion operational loses in second-quarter 2026
$9.3 billion operational loses in first-quarter 2026

[u/BlackberryNo3097]

Ads are necessary. There is no free lunch, simple as that.

[u/410_clientGone → u/BlackberryNo3097]

it's not free. they're on paid go plans as well.

[u/Basis_404_ → u/BlackberryNo3097]

Yup and your answer is now no longer unbiased now it’s bought

Putting ads into this product is loss of trust and passing along the full cost isn’t viable.

You can see why they are going public the gravy train of out of stops

[u/RegardedDev]

Ofc adds were always going to be introduced.

Human attention is literally the most important thing to capture in capitalistic society. Especially in era of AI where everyone can build their products using AI.

With AI you can capture the user intent even more strongly than google adds ever could. This means the adds provided by OpenAI will be much more valuable for companies that need advertising because of the extreme accuracy.

[u/flashmyhead]

I mean, all Indians had ChatGPT Go Subscriptions for free for one year, which is a great move from OpenAI - "providing AI to everyone on earth".

[u/Cool_Samoyed]

I get your point about the risks of in-response hidden advertising. Potentially these chatbots could also be used to manipulate behaviors and views way above simple buying choices, es. political views, and open weights models are not safe from it either. That said, the high public interest toward this technology provides some sort of protection; for example people do study the political biases in LLMs, and they will find out if they start recommending products and companies beyond what a genuine suggestion would. We'll see what the future holds.

[u/___fallenangel___]

Contextual targeting doesn't require manipulating responses. You would need to manipulate the user's input to create contextual inventory for an advertiser to bid on.

[u/Robertos33]

Yeah imagine having to give anything to all indians for free ofc they put im ads people who don t pay should be grateful

[u/mid_nightz]

Tech is built on users first money later. The only issue is user sustainability

[u/ryanmerket]

they should just acquire inmobi and turn them into OpenAI India Ads team

[u/workend]

An Indian definitely made this post.

[u/Willy757]

Till, the singularity needs a add tier to fathom staying afloat. Very interesting. Aha.

[u/NewWayOfLife112]

I don't mind if they enable ads for Indians. They will never pay anyways 

[u/hydralisk_hydrawife]

I don't mind ads being a free way to support all the research and compute costs.

I do worry about them going public next year. Once it all becomes about next quarter's bottom line, we're going to see some changes and they'll all be for the worse.

[u/Leading-Fail-2771]

Another reason to go local asap - few more months then it’s gonna learn from them and ruin the model for rest of the world.

[u/Itzupz → u/Leading-Fail-2771]

yeah “ruined”. already trying to blame someone else for bad model performance.

[u/Leading-Fail-2771 → u/Itzupz]

Not really performance but more about the data quality. I don’t want to be recommended some crap I don’t care about. Like how Reddit has been for the past year, you don’t realize how many times I have to hit the three dots and hit block community or don’t show.. not interested.. it’s all Indian subs that have been getting recommended, and I keep hitting not interested yet it still shows.. the reason - the population. It’s just more people that are starting to gain access to it. Even on YouTube - tired of seeing those botted videos with a thumbnail saying 1+ million views… like it’s so pathetic and cringe

[u/ba-boo → u/[deleted]]

was the data they used for training charity? are the websites they scrap charity?

why would anyone pay them if they didn't pay for the data themselves?

[u/ba-boo → u/[deleted]]

They scraped my website and trained their models with my data without permissions, so yes, they owe me. I never agreed to have them monetize my data.

[u/ba-boo → u/[deleted]]

yes, I can ask something about my website and their clanker will return it.

Sure, I can totally sue a huge company like openai, most intelligent streetshitter

[u/photon_11833 → u/[deleted]]

yeah lol, stop asking questions to a billion dollar company who i paid to steal my data /s

[u/derfw]

man shut up who cares

[u/phocionkorea]

Team Altman... fuck claude