Seriously, we all know:
1) Those Anthropic ads don't matter. Companies eat up their promises all the time and rarely face any consequence. They'll introduce ads one way or another.
2) Sam Altman's tweets don't matter. They never matter. Tweets from any OpenAI employee are purely to pump engagement. If what they said had a sliver of substance we would have had AGI mid-2025.
The whole 'war' is just to keep their brands mentioned on news and social media.
* https://youtu.be/FBSam25u8O4
* https://youtu.be/De-_wQpKw0s
* https://youtu.be/kQRu7DdTTVA
* https://youtu.be/3sVD3aG_azw
Hope the dude is ok, can't imagine getting so offended by these ads
Whose agency? Ads are designed to reduce agency. It’s a red queen’s race from there. It leads to a high level of optimized manipulation and intrusiveness.
That was one of the core points of anthropic’s article.
sama is right that anthropic’s and openai’s businesses are differently shaped. Thank goodness for that.
The free to paid user ratio of both services is worth seeing too.
Personally I find both are growing cleanly into their own areas of strengths and that's actually a good thing because it provides more coverage for solutions.
They may not run ads for foreseeable future, but there will come a point where they introduce a different tier service that does, whether they want it or not.
Their investors will call the shot.
The front matter of big politics and big tech is not too different from professional wrestling.
Tesla Trailing P/E: 390.70 Apple Trailing P/E: 34.11 Ford Trailing P/E : 11.74
Om Malik has been writing about this recently, especially regarding OpenAI / Altman [1], but you can see it everywhere.
1 - https://om.co/2026/02/02/openai-and-the-announcement-economy...
But they are paying, aren't they?
Advertisements don't generate money from thin air. Advertisements cause people to spend money they otherwise would not have spent. That's why companies buy ads in the first place.
And if you're showing ads to poor people, you're probably causing them to spend money they don't have.
It seems like the same is true of advertising. Yes, some people are spending money but it doesn't necessarily follow that they're people who can't afford it.
> One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.
It’s one thing to say your competitors are hypocrites they will have ads one day, just watch. But democratic vs authoritarian? Come on. What is next? They are Chinese spies and Russian agents? Smh
This is a glaring admission ChatGPT is a poor man's Claude in the literal sense.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman was the biggest donor to Trump's super PAC in H2 2025, donating $25M https://www.techmeme.com/260102/p10#a260102p10
"More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.)"
Why the incumbent BigCo AI CEO -- who has more Texans using their product than apparently Claude's entire US userbase -- needs to or rather is choosing to be using zingers to make a rebuttal about a competitor's ads is much more interesting than the content of the message itself... which is mostly corporate feelgood slop.
Is OpenAI's runway actually as bad as the doomers like Ed Zitron think it is? Is OpenAI's deal with NVIDIA actually on ice? Are they seeing something in the subscription data that is troubling? Maybe it's nothing and SamA just felt like doing some dunking on twitter today. Or maybe the stress levels around running openAI have increased.
I previously thought OpenAI was going to be fine and the doomers were wrong. I still think the race is theirs to lose since they have very strong branding and userbase right now. But this is a very weak signal that gives me more pause about OpenAI's future than any of the doomsayer articles have.
I give a slightly higher weight to my psychoanalysis of the company's CEO's actions because none of the doomer articles have access to material nonpublic information or company internals to truly opine on the financial health of a multibillion dollar enterprise.
That zinger seemed similar to how Trump deals with criticism from the media -- he tends to begin with an attack on the ratings / popularity of the speaker.
That’s quite different from shoving ads in your face where it doesn’t belong. Like an ad for Copilot on a YouTube video.
IMO it’s distinct.
There was absolutely no need to come out publicly with such whiny remarks, it's marketing, as the CEO I'd expect much better than that, he should know that it doesn't help at all. Even more since the ad was funny, coming out with dry remarks about the obvious misrepresentation made as a joke is frankly a bit pathetic.
Losing move but the interesting part is: why? Something hit a nerve, maybe it's a sign of some buildup of stress from overcommitments? I cannot understand...
Says the guy trying to buy high resolution scans of people's eyeballs for $25 a pop.
Okay dude.