For three years, we have suspended our disbelief.
We treated the blinking cursor of ChatGPT not as a product, but as an oracle.
It was a super intelligent friend, floating above the messy, capitalistic fray of the internet, dispensing haikus, code, and therapy without asking for anything in return.
It felt less like a tech utility and more like a public service, subsidized by the benevolent billionaires of Silicon Valley.
Over the last month, however, that illusion has been shattered.
The cracks started small.
A user asked a question about Windows encryption, and the oracle blinked.
It didn't explain BitLocker.
It didn't offer a workaround.
Instead, with the cheerful, hollow enthusiasm of a morning show host, it suggested the user should really check out the sheet sale at Target.
Elsewhere, a podcast summary was derailed by a sudden, unprompted pitch for a Peloton class.
The internet reacted exactly how you would expect: outrage.
People screamed "Greed!" and "Enshittification!"
They mourned the death of their helpful, neutral robot friend.
But the outrage is missing the point.
The clumsy, ugly ads aren’t the crisis.
They are just the symptom.
The real crisis is that OpenAI is dying a slow, expensive death.
And the only thing that can save it is the one thing we all hate: ads.
If you care about the future of ChatGPT, you shouldn’t be angry about the ads.
You should be praying they work.
The Broken Machine
To understand why OpenAI is resorting to digital door-to-door sales, you have to ignore the hype and look at the electric bill.
We have been conditioned by three decades of Google to believe that digital intelligence is free.
You type a query, you get an answer.
For Google, this transaction is negligible.
Retrieving a list of blue links from a database costs fractions of a penny.
It is so cheap it is effectively free. Google can slap a single banner ad next to the results and print money.
Generative AI is different. It is physically heavy.
When you ask ChatGPT to rewrite a cover letter, you aren't just querying a database. You are spinning up a warehouse full of H100 GPUs, the most expensive computer chips on the planet.
These machines run hot—so hot they require industrial cooling systems that could air-condition a skyscraper.
Every time you press "Enter," you are adding fuel to the fire of OpenAI’s cash burn.
In 2025 alone, OpenAI spent an estimated $8.5 billion just on "inference"—the technical term for "keeping the lights on."
That figure doesn't include the salaries of their $800,000-a-year researchers or the cost of training the next model.
That is just the daily cost of answering our questions.
This creates a perverse economic reality: a "Profitability Paradox."
For Facebook or Google, every new user is an asset.
For OpenAI, every new free user is a liability.
Burn rate based on publicly available information and estimates
We are eating their compute, drinking their electricity, and paying them nothing.
They are a startup with the burn rate of a G7 nation, and their credit card is nearly maxed out.
The Ghost in the Boardroom
But the money problem is only half the story. The other half is why the ad rollout was so bad.
Why did it look like a glitch?
Why did it feel so sneaky?
Because OpenAI isn’t the same company it was two years ago.
The company never truly recovered from the chaos of 2023, when the board fired CEO Sam Altman and then hired him back five days later.
That week didn't just break the org chart; it broke the culture.
Since then, the "brain trust" has left.
The people who built the magic—leaders like Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati—are gone. The company went from a unified research lab to a fractured corporate giant trying to survive.
When you see a clumsy ad for Peloton pop up in the middle of a serious conversation, you aren't just seeing a bad feature.
You are seeing a lack of leadership.
You are seeing a product team that is scrambling, trying to plug the financial holes without a clear vision.
They are throwing spaghetti at the wall because they are terrified of running out of cash.
The Hard Pill to Swallow
This brings us to the uncomfortable truth.
For OpenAI to survive, its users will have two choices:
Choice A: They keep demanding a free, ad-free, magical assistant. OpenAI keeps burning cash until the investors pull the plug. The quality degrades. The models get dumber to save power. Eventually, the company gets bought out and gutted, or it fades away.
Choice B: They accept that the magic isn’t free and accept ads.
The people yelling about "commercial corruption" are living in a fantasy world.
They want the benefits of a billion-dollar supercomputer without paying for the electricity.
If ads work, OpenAI potentially survives.
They can slow their cash bleed and give them more time to find other potential sources of profitability.
The Guardrails We Need
However, accepting ads doesn't mean users have to accept bad ads.
This is where the battle should be fought.
We shouldn't be fighting the existence of ads; we should be fighting for the integrity of the answers.
If ChatGPT tells me to buy a certain laptop because it is actually the best laptop, that is helpful.
If it tells me to buy that laptop because Dell paid them five dollars, that is a lie.
This is the danger zone. As soon as money enters the chat, the AI stops being a neutral advisor and starts being a salesperson.
We need strict guardrails.
Transparency: An ad must look like an ad. It should be labeled, highlighted, and obvious. No sneaking it into the text.
Relevance: Don't sell me sheets when I'm asking about coding. It ruins the flow and makes the tool useless.
The "Church and State" Divide: The part of the AI that answers your medical questions must never talk to the part of the AI that sells ads.
The European Union will likely step in with regulations to enforce this, and for once, that regulation will be welcome.
We need a referee to make sure the desperation for revenue doesn't destroy the utility of the tool.
Growing Up
The "Target Ad" saga wasn't the end of OpenAI.
It was the end of its childhood.
For three years, we got to play with a magical toy that was subsidized by venture capital billionaires. We lived in a bubble where we thought we could have unlimited intelligence for free.
That bubble has popped and now the bill has arrived.
OpenAI is broken culturally, and it is bleeding financially.
Ads are the cast on OpenAI’s broken business model and org chart.
Ads are itchy, they are ugly, and they are annoying.
But Ads are necessary for OpenAI to heal.
If we want OpenAI to survive long enough to build the future, we have to let them sell the present.
We don't have to like it.
But we have to understand that without it, the screen goes dark.