OpenAI hit a billion dollars in annualized ad revenue. The company that taught computers to think decided the real money was in banner ads. Revolutionary.
Anthropic ran a Super Bowl commercial mocking this decision. A company that burns investor cash to make a chatbot nobody asked for spent seven million dollars on thirty seconds of airtime to ridicule another company for finding a business model. The irony died of embarrassment before the second quarter started.
ChatGPT now serves ads between existential questions about mortality and requests to debug Python scripts. Some programmer in Denver asks the meaning of life and gets an answer sponsored by Nord VPN. This is progress.
A billion dollars annualized means they haven't actually made a billion dollars. It means if you take what they made recently and pretend that pace continues forever, you get a big number. Retail traders see "billion" and "OpenAI" in the same headline and buy Microsoft calls without reading further. They will lose money and blame the market.
The ad business shows "blistering growth" according to the headline. Blistering. As if revenue grew so fast it developed a skin condition. Every tech company that sells ads claims blistering growth until the quarter they revise guidance and fire the sales team.
Anthropic's CEO probably rehearsed that Super Bowl ad concept in the mirror for weeks. Felt good about it too. Clever. Righteous. Then OpenAI counted a billion reasons not to care what Anthropic thinks.
The funniest part is neither company makes money. They both light billions on fire training models that cost more to run than they generate. But one of them figured out you can stick ads in front of the money pit and call it a business. The other one bought a Super Bowl spot to complain about it.
Photo by Levart_Photographer on Unsplash
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