Google DeepMind CEO is ‘surprised’ OpenAI is rushing forward with ads in ChatGPT

Summary

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he’s “surprised” that OpenAI has already moved to introduce ads within its AI chatbot. In an interview with Axios at Davos, the AI leader was responding to a question about using ads to monetize AI services, saying the idea is something that the team at Google was thinking through “very carefully.” Hassabis also said that his team wasn’t feeling pressure from the tech giant make “a knee-jerk” decision around advertising, despite how key ads are to Google’s core business. The DeepMind co-founder’s remarks followed Friday’s news that OpenAI will begin testing ads as a way to generate additional revenue from the portion of the AI chatbot’s 800 million weekly active users who don’t have a paid subscription. While OpenAI may have been forced to consider ads, considering its growing infrastructure and energy costs, its decision could change how users view the service. “I’m a little bit surprised they’ve moved so early into that,” Hassabis said, referring to OpenAI’s adoption of ads. “I mean, look, ads, there’s nothing wrong with ads…they funded much of the consumer internet. And if done well, they can be useful,” he clarified. “But in the realm of assistants, and if you think of the chatbot as an assistant that’s meant to be helpful — and ideally, in my mind, as they become more powerful, the kind of technology that works for you as the individual…there is a question about how ads fit into that model?… You want to have trust in your assistant, so how does that work?” he questioned. Reiterating some early comments from another Davos interview, Hassabis also said that Google didn’t have “any current plans” to do ads in its AI chatbot. Instead, the company would monitor the situation to see how users respond. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 Of course, we’ve already seen consumer backlash to the idea of ads infiltrating people’s conversations with AI assistants. When OpenAI last month began exploring a feature that ...