OpenAI explores introducing ads into AI products to seek new revenue sources

The chief financial officer of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said the firm is discussing plans to introduce advertising to its suite of products as it seeks new revenue streams.OpenAI has been hiring advertising talent from large tech rivals such as Meta and Google, according to people familiar with the matter."We are seeing significant opportunities in our current business model, and our current business is growing rapidly," said Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, in a statement. "While we are open to exploring other revenue streams in the future, we do not have active plans to pursue advertising at this time."Perplexity, a smaller competitor, has experimented with advertising in its artificial intelligence search engine. Friar, who has held leadership roles at Nextdoor, Square and Salesforce, noted that she and Kevin Weil, the company's chief product officer, have experience in advertising.Meanwhile, Elon Musk has asked a US federal court to block OpenAI from "illegally" transforming into a for-profit business to prevent it from engaging in anticompetitive behaviour.OpenAI is also reportedly considering launching its own web browser to challenge Google's Chrome, which has dominated the search field for more than a decade.Several Canadian news media companies have also sued OpenAI for illegally using their content to train artificial intelligence models.In October, OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, completed its latest round of fundraising, raising $6.6bn at a valuation of $157bn, making it the second-most valuable start-up in the world.*