Jaden Schaefer

This is all in a blog post that they did.

They said that January and February were on track to be the largest months for new subscribers in their history.

They said right now their usage is scaling a lot, but they also need to make a lot of improvements on speed, reliability, safety, and consistency.

And these are becoming a lot more important to users, according to them.

so at the same time as all of these kind of financial announcements this raising money and getting new users uh they've also been experimenting with more monetization beyond just the subscriptions we know last month they confirmed plans to introduce ads into the free and go tier the go tier is the eight dollar a month tier which personally i think is sort of a scam to to charge people eight dollars a month and still show them ads if you would like to use chat gpt for eight dollars a month and not pay for ads go check out aibox.ai my own platform not so subtle plug there

because ads are rolling out in the US.

They actually rolled out earlier this month to users.

Some people were criticizing them.

Anthropic put out, you know, Super Bowl ads criticizing them and said, you know, we'll never have ads inside of Anthropic, but they don't have the cheaper tier.

Speaking at the AI Summit in India,

OpenAI's COO Brad Lightcap was basically describing the ad rollout as iterative and kind of emphasized that it's really important for them to get users trust and privacy.

He said that the ads, if they could do them thoughtfully, could actually enhance instead of distract from the user experience.

But he also said that, you know, he definitely acknowledges the company is still in the early process with all of this.

OpenAI has not specified whether they're planning to add ads beyond the U.S.

market.

So that's all we know for the time being that they're going to add ads.

I think there's a lot of competitive tension that has obviously spilled out into the public because of this.

Earlier this month, the CEO, Sam Altman, he was criticizing Anthropic on X. He basically said that they were building an expensive product aimed at rich people.

And then he was kind of defending OpenAI's commitment to free access for everyone.

He also argued that scale basically creates a different kind of challenge.