Congratulations to Google and Meta — they’re expecting.
OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, was describing her company’s ads ambitions on Tuesday when she said that ChatGPT is like “if Google and Meta had a baby.”
Friar made the remarks before a full room of investors and analysts at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco.
The comment succinctly outlines OpenAI’s ambition to turn ChatGPT into a money-printing ads platform, following in the footsteps of its tech giant predecessors. In just seven months of placing ads on the chatbot, OpenAI’s ads business is now raking in cash at a rate that Friar said would equal $1 billion in revenue if mapped across a full year.
She attributed the “baby” idea to Fidji Simo, the former OpenAI executive who stepped down this year from her role running the company’s commercial operations.
Friar went on to explain that she thinks ChatGPT can use the data it learns from its users to bring the “intent” of a Google search together with the “context” that Meta has on its social media users.
“It’s high intent search, you’re telling a lot, but with the context — it’s not quite people like me, it’s me, because it has all the memory of me,” Friar said. “So when you put those two things together, the ability to have a really potent ad platform is clearly there.”
Right now, OpenAI serves basic ads underneath ChatGPT’s responses if a user is on the free or Go subscription tiers. Friar expects a more complex, more tailored format in the future. She said her team has shown her “early indications” of what a more AI-native ad format could look like as they develop the platform’s basics and scale its availability.
“This is all before we’ve really launched a format that feels truly endemic to AI,” Friar said. “That’s what I get super excited about.”
OpenAI’s focus on advertising marks a full 180 since 2024, when CEO Sam Altman said he found the idea of combining ads and AI “uniquely unsettling.”
The ambitions are a break from rival Anthropic, which has skewered the idea of ads in chatbot responses. Each of the companies is preparing to go public in highly anticipated IPOs 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 Anthropic’s public version is expected in the coming weeks. OpenAI has not disclosed a specific timeline, but Friar has previously said that the listing will happen by the end of 2027.
OpenAI was last valued at a $852 billion in a March fundraise that injected $122 billion into its coffers.
The company is trying to parlay that cash, its 1 billion-user ChatGPT app, and its status on the frontier of AI research into a sustainable business. Friar has to balance OpenAI’s growing consumer and enterprise businesses with the AI lab’s vast expenses on AI inference, data center construction, and research.
Friar steered Square through its 2015 IPO as the company’s CFO and was Nextdoor’s CEO during its transition to the public markets via a 2021 SPAC.
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