OpenAI CFO defends ChatGPT ads as 'strong business model'

By Mucahithan Avcioglu

ISTANBUL (AA) - OpenAI chief financial officer (CFO) Sarah Friar on Wednesday defended the company's decision to include advertisements in its well-known chatbot ChatGPT.

Friar told a panel called Building AI for the Long Term at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday that the company must "create a strong business model" in order to fulfill its objective of making AI accessible to a larger public.

“Our mission is artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay,” she said.

“Early is a weird word,” said Friar on Wednesday, when asked to address concerns about the timing of the ads.

“In ad models, you have to be at scale. Sub-scale ad models don’t work, so that would be early. When you have 800 million weekly active users, you’re really far beyond many of the companies who started in that model," she added.

Last week, OpenAI declared that it would test targeted advertisements for certain US users of ChatGPT's free edition. The chatbot has either been free up until now or requires a monthly subscription charge.

The industry, which faces high expenses for processing power, personnel, and impending infrastructure buildouts, is at a turning point with OpenAI's decision to launch advertisements. Executives at the company are under pressure to defend both its aggressive approach and its valuation, which is among the highest of any private corporation in the world, according to Bloomberg.

The firm announced earlier this week that its annualized revenue in 2025 reached $20 billion, a measure used by software companies to show growth.