The A in AGI Stands for Ads

Summary

The World is Ads Here we go again, the tech press is having another AI doom cycle. I've primarily written this as a response to an NYT analyst painting a completely unsubstantiated, baseless, speculative, outrageous, EGREGIOUS, preposterous "grim picture" on OpenAI going bust. Mate come on. OpenAI is not dying, they're not running out of money. Yes, they're creating possibly the craziest circular economy and defying every economics law since Adam Smith published 'The Wealth of Nations'. $1T in commitments is genuinely insane. But I doubt they're looking to be acquired; honestly by who? you don't raise $40 BILLION at $260 BILLION VALUATION to get acquired. It's all for the $1T IPO. But it seems that the pinnacle of human intelligence: the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine. What happened to superintelligence and AGI? See if OpenAI was not a direct threat to the current ad giants would Google be advertising Gemini every chance they get? Don't forget they're also capitalising on their brand new high-intent ad funnel by launching ads on Gemini and AI overview. Let's crunch the numbers. Quick Recap of OpenAI's 2025 March: Closed $40B funding round at $260B valuation, the largest raise by a private tech company on record. June: Hit $10B ARR. July: First $1B revenue month, doubled from $500M monthly in January. November: Sam Altman says OpenAI expects $20B ARR for 2025. Reached 800M WAU, ~190M DAU, 35M paying subscribers, 1M business customers. January 2026: "Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time-highs (Jan 14 was the highest, Jan 13 was the second highest, etc.)" January 16, 2026: Announced ads in ChatGPT free and Go tiers. Yes, OpenAI is burning $8-12B in 2025. Compute infrastructure is obviously not cheap when serving 190M people daily. Predicting OpenAI's Ad Strategy So let's try to model their expected ARPU (annual revenue per user) by understanding wh...