Congratulations to Google and Meta: they are expecting.
OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, described her company’s operations advertising ambitions Tuesday when she said ChatGPT is like “if Google and Meta had a baby.”
Friar made the comments to a packed room of investors and analysts at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco.
The comment succinctly outlines OpenAI’s ambition to make ChatGPT a money advertisement printing platform, following in the footsteps of its technological giant predecessors. In just seven months of placing ads on the chatbot, OpenAI’s advertising activities is now raking in cash at a rate that Friar says would equate to $1 billion in revenue if charted over a full year.
She attributed the “baby” idea to Fiji Simo, the former OpenAI manager who resigned this year from her role in leading the company’s commercial activities.
Friar further explained that she thinks ChatGPT can use the data it learns from its users to bring together the “intent” of a Google search with the “context” Meta has on its social media users.
“It is a search with a high intention, you tell a lot, but with the context: they are not really people like me, it is me, because it has the whole memory of me,” said Friar. “So when you put these two things together, the opportunity to have a really powerful advertising platform is clearly there.”
Currently, OpenAI serves basic ads under ChatGPT comments if a user is on a Free or Go plan. Friar expects a more complex, more customized format in the future. She said her team has given her “early indications” of what a more AI-native ad format might look like as they develop the platform’s fundamentals and scale its availability.
“This is all before we’ve really launched a format that feels really endemic to AI,” Friar said. “That makes me super excited.”
OpenAI’s focus on advertising marks a complete 180 since 2024, when CEO Sam Altman said he liked the idea of combining ads and AI ‘uniquely disturbing’.
The ambitions are a break from rival Anthropic, which has pushed the idea of ads in chatbot responses. Each of the companies is preparing to go public in highly anticipated initial public offerings that will test Wall Street’s appetite for AI and serve as referendums on the strength of the companies’ finances.
Both companies filed their confidential S-1 prospectuses in June, and the public version of Anthropic is expected in the coming weeks. OpenAI has not disclosed a specific timeline, but Friar has previously said the listing will take place in late 2027.
OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion during a fundraising in March, injecting $122 billion into its coffers.
The company is trying to parlay that money, its ChatGPT app with 1 billion users, and its status on the frontier of AI research into a sustainable business. Friar must balance OpenAI’s growing consumer and business businesses with the AI lab’s massive spending on AI inference, data center construction and research.
Friar guided Square through its 2015 IPO as the company’s CFO and was Nextdoor’s CEO during its transition to the public markets via a SPAC in 2021.
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