OpenAI Might Be Dying
A glance at the company's latest challenges and why it might not survive 2026 | Edition #266
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OpenAI Might Be Dying
Last week was not easy for OpenAI.
Three days ago, Sam Altman launched his new company, Merge Labs, a Neuralink-like startup developing AI-powered brain-computer interfaces. On the same day, OpenAI announced it is participating in Merge Labs’ seed round.
Brain-computer interfaces seem to be a whole new territory for both OpenAI and Sam Altman. Merge Labs will compete directly against Musk’s Neuralink and other heavily specialized players in this field.
At a time when Google and Anthropic are slowly but aggressively taking over the LLM market, opening a new business arm could be seen as a distraction or a desperate attempt to reshape the main business model before it collapses.
Putting that aside for a moment, two days ago, OpenAI announced it would start testing ads on ChatGPT.
In the past, Sam Altman has publicly positioned himself against ads on ChatGPT. In a podcast interview with Lex Fridman in 2024, he said:
“it’s also easy to think about the dystopic visions of the future where you ask ChatGPT something and it says, ‘Oh, you should think about buying this product,’ or, ‘You should think about going here for your vacation,’ or whatever.”
In another interview in October 2024, Altman said:
“I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model"
Mounting competition from other AI companies, especially Google, and growing costs forced him to soften his stance on ads and go on a hiring spree focused on people with ad experience.
According to The Information, 630 people, or 20% of OpenAI’s workforce in late 2025, had previously worked at Meta.
In November last year, there was a leak that seemed to indicate that OpenAI was preparing to launch ads. In December, a user seemed to have spotted the first ChatGPT ad, and an OpenAI employee responded by saying that it was not an ad, only a suggestion to install a certain app (a distinction that changed little).
The company clearly did not want to admit that ads were coming. It knew the public's reaction would be mainly negative, potentially further aggravating OpenAI's financial woes.
That's exactly what is happening now.
Many have been joking that, for OpenAI, AGI means “ad-generated income,” and users have been anticipating how dystopian and manipulative ChatGPT ads could look.
The danger of manipulation is real.
ChatGPT is an anthropomorphic chatbot, so unlike a search engine or social media platform, which also have access to deeply personal data about people, it is emotionally fine-tuned and relies on persuasive language to create the illusion of trust, intimacy, loyalty, and companionship.
The chatbot’s projected attachment can lead to emotional manipulation.
If ChatGPT ends up being fine-tuned to improve the ultra-personalization and the “effectiveness” of its ads, which is exactly the path to making the ad platform the money-making machine OpenAI has been dreaming of, we will start seeing new levels of ad-related privacy invasion, abuse, and exploitation of emotional vulnerabilities.
OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the company’s investors know that.
But Google’s aggressive AI integration into its various billion-user products seems to have been the final straw Altman mentioned in that 2024 podcast. For OpenAI, it is ads or die.
It might die anyway, especially in light of Elon Musk’s Friday court filing, which was last week’s third and perhaps most catastrophic development for OpenAI: