TECHNOLOGY NEWS

<h1>ChatGPT Now Has Ads</h1>

Happy Weekends everybody!

This week: the biggest shift in AI's business model since ChatGPT launched, Elon Musk abandons Mars for the Moon (sort of), Samsung finally confirms its next flagship reveal, and gaming news for both PlayStation fans.

                                                           Let's get into it 👇️

🚀 SpaceX is pivoting from Mars to the Moon. Elon Musk announced Sunday that SpaceX has "shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon," saying it's achievable in under 10 years vs. 20+ years for Mars (Yahoo Finance)

🤖 Amazon is planning an AI content marketplace where publishers can sell content to AI companies. The marketplace would let media companies set their own terms and pricing for AI training and generation use, potentially a more sustainable model than one-off licensing deals (Reuters)

🎮 PlayStation State of Play airs tomorrow (Thursday) with a 60-minute showcase. Sony says viewers can expect over an hour of news, gameplay updates, and announcements from game studios around the world (GameSpot)

🌉 Samsung just confirmed Galaxy Unpacked for February 25 in San Francisco. The Galaxy S26 series will be revealed, with Galaxy AI taking center stage (Samsung Newsroom)

🤖 Tristan Harris, former Google ethicist, warns AI could collapse the job market by 2027. Stanford data already shows a 13% drop in early-career jobs. His take (Fortune)

It finally happened: ChatGPT has ads.

OpenAI began rolling out sponsored placements this week for users on the Free and "Go" subscription tiers.

The ads appear at the bottom of ChatGPT's responses and are priced at $60 per thousand views (positioning them as premium inventory compared to traditional display advertising).

OpenAI says ads won't influence the answers ChatGPT gives you and that conversations remain private from advertisers. But, if you have "ads personalization" turned on, the ads will be tailored based on your chats and the context ChatGPT uses to respond.

The timing is notable. Just hours before OpenAI's announcement, competitor Anthropic ran a Super Bowl ad with a pointed message: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."

The philosophical split is now official. OpenAI is betting that an ad-supported model can coexist with a good user experience, while Anthropic is doubling down on subscriptions and positioning itself as the privacy-first alternative.

It's the same debate that defined the early internet: free-with-ads vs. pay-for-privacy.

For OpenAI, the move makes financial sense. The company reportedly needs to hit aggressive revenue targets to justify its valuation, and advertising opens up an enormous new market beyond paid subscriptions.

But for users, it represents a fundamental shift in what ChatGPT is. In many cases, when a product is free you're the product, and now that's literally true for ChatGPT.

Every question you ask could be shaping what ads you see next.

The real question is whether users will care. Most people have made peace with personalized advertising across Google, Meta, and everywhere else online. But AI feels different: more intimate, more like a conversation with a thinking partner than a search query.

Whether that feeling survives the arrival of sponsored content is something we're about to find out.