Last spring, speaking from the pulpit of Harvard’s Memorial Church, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a mini-sermon against advertising. “I hate ads,” he confessed, arguing that they “misalign a user’s incentives with the company providing the service.” Pairing artificial intelligence with ads, he added, felt “uniquely unsettling.”
The moment echoed a claim made a generation earlier by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who in a 1998 research paper warned that ad-funded search engines would inevitably tilt toward advertisers and away from users.
History, of course, took a different turn. Google’s venture backers soon insisted on a seasoned CEO; the founders tapped Eric Schmidt, who in turn hired Sheryl Sandberg to build an ad machine. When Google went public, Brin and Page recast ads as “great commercial information.”
A similar storyline unfolded at Facebook. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg told The Stanford Daily that ads might not be necessary. A few years later, Facebook was using users’ data—and their friends’ data—to fine-tune ad targeting. Sandberg again played a central role, and when economic pressure mounted, Facebook doubled down on advertising by harvesting and monetizing ever more personal information.
Now OpenAI is poised to repeat the pattern. Founded as a nonprofit devoted to A.I. “for the benefit of humanity,” the company has reorganized into a for-profit public-benefit corporation, lifted caps on investor returns, and begun to hint at an eventual IPO. CFO Sarah Friar has said that while OpenAI has “no active plans” for ads, the idea is on the table. Altman has floated an affiliate-revenue model in which OpenAI would earn a cut whenever users buy something ChatGPT recommends.
It’s easy to imagine the next step: ChatGPT melding users’ most intimate prompts—marital woes, workplace conflicts—with the vast corpus of text it ingested during training to deliver hyper-personalized pitches, all in the name of “helpful recommendations.” Google is already inserting ads alongside its A.I. answers.
The danger isn’t merely that user-first tools would morph into advertiser-first engines, but that they would massively expand what scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism: a system that monetizes our experiences and identities to steer our choices. Tech companies would accumulate unprecedented power over what we know and how we act—an “epistemic coup,” in Zuboff’s phrase.
Veteran investor Roger McNamee, an early mentor to Sandberg and Zuckerberg turned critic, sees a bigger hazard this time: A.I. models devour more data, guzzle more energy, and threaten more jobs than earlier ad platforms—and, he argues, offer “minimal” new value. If OpenAI embraces ads, McNamee warns, it will be a “five-alarm fire.”
Altman says roughly 10 percent of the planet already uses OpenAI’s products—a striking figure for such a young company, but one that leaves a large majority still unconvinced. Many people, having lived through Google and Facebook’s pivot to surveillance advertising, can spot the sequel. They know how the story ends—and they’re bracing for the rerun.
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