My senior year, news filtered into The Stanford Daily, where I worked, that Facebook — which some of us had heard about from friends at Harvard, where it had started — was coming to our campus. “I know it sounds corny, but I’d love to improve people’s lives, especially socially,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder, told The Daily’s reporter. He added, “In the future we may sell ads to get the money back, but since providing the service is so cheap, we may choose not to do that for a while.”
Mr. Zuckerberg went on to quit Harvard and move to Palo Alto, Calif. I went on to The Wall Street Journal. Covering Facebook in 2007, I got a scoop that Facebook — which had in fact introduced ads — would begin using data from individual users and their “friends” on the site to sharpen how ads were targeted to them. Like Google before it, Facebook positioned this as being good for users. Mr. Zuckerberg even brought Ms. Sandberg over from Google to help. When an economic downturn, followed by an I.P.O., later put pressure on Facebook, it followed Google’s playbook: doubling down on advertising. In this case, it did so by collecting and monetizing even more personal information about its users.
Which brings me back to Mr. Altman and OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. It started as a nonprofit with a stated mission to build A.I. that would benefit humanity. After several interim restructurings, OpenAI has now announced that it will create a public benefit corporation (albeit one still controlled by the nonprofit) to serve both the public good and shareholders’ needs, while removing a cap on investors’ returns — a change its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, said “gets us to an I.P.O.-able event … if and when we want to.” The prospect of an I.P.O. and talk of an economic downturn: the same conditions that preceded Google and Facebook’s turn to advertising.
The stage is set, then, for the next phase of Big Tech’s ever-deepening exploitation of the natural human desire for information, connection and well-being. It’s not surprising, in that context, that Mr. Altman and other OpenAI executives are gently floating the prospect of using advertising after all. In December, Ms. Friar told The Financial Times that OpenAI is considering it, though she clarified that the company has “no active plans” for ads. Mr. Altman mused later about an affiliate revenue model, by which his company would collect a percentage of sales whenever people bought something they discovered through an OpenAI feature called Deep Research. He added, “That would be cool.”
Mr. Altman specified that OpenAI wouldn’t sell accept money to change the placement of product mentions. Still, it’s not hard to imagine how a new OpenAI might work, combining all the personal information we already share with ChatGPT — marriage troubles, office conflicts — with the billions of words of text OpenAI consumed while building its products, in order to send us increasingly well-targeted recommendations about what to do with our time, money and attention.
