Ads are officially coming to ChatGPT

PLUS: Musk, OpenAI trade (more) public blows ahead of trial

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Sam Altman once called ads in ChatGPT a "last resort" — but now, they're officially on the way.

OpenAI will begin testing targeted ads for free and budget tier users in the U.S., marking a controversial monetization shift that could set the tone for how the entire AI industry balances user trust with revenue pressures.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI officially bringing ads to ChatGPT

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

  • Code from your phone with OpenAI’s Codex

  • Musk, OpenAI trade (more) public blows

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced it will begin testing targeted advertisements in ChatGPT for free and Go tier users in the U.S. — putting into motion a major (and controversial) monetization shift for the AI giant as it eyes a late-2026 IPO.

The details:

  • Ads will appear below responses as "Sponsored Recommendations," targeted based on conversations but excluded from health, politics, and underage users.

  • The move coincides with the company’s $8/month ChatGPT Go tier launching globally, with ads included to offset the lower price point.

  • Premium tiers (Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise) remain ad-free, with OAI pledging to never sell user data or let ads influence ChatGPT's answers.

  • Sam Altman had said in 2024 that ads in ChatGPT would be a “last resort”, but more recently said he “wasn’t totally against it” if it didn’t violate user trust.

Why it matters: We’ve heard conflicting statements from OAI’s leadership in the past on ads, but the March hiring of Instacart’s Fidji Simo hinted at both the IPO and advertising route. Ads in AI assistants are a slippery slope, so the execution will be a nuanced moment to watch — potentially setting the tone for the industry as a whole.

TOGETHER WITH THOUGHTWORKS

The Rundown: AI/works is Thoughtworks’ agentic development platform that unifies expert technologists and decades of engineering excellence so you can build, modernize, and evolve enterprise systems faster.

Discover how it enables you to:

  • Move from spec to code

  • Build once, reuse everywhere, compound speed over time

  • Integrate seamlessly with your stack

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Rowan, Founder & CEO: Granola AI has become my meeting recorder outside of just Zoom meetings. I recently had a 3-hour meeting with legal for business structuring, and I turned on Granola AI on my phone (with other parties' consent), and it picked up the entire transcript nearly word for word (for over 3 hours!), which I later pasted into ChatGPT to go back and forth on things that I didn't fully grasp in the moment.

Joey, Head of Partnerships: I have been looking around at new apartment development projects, looking to potentially buy in the next two years. I used ChatGPT Deep Research to help compare the cost, the quality of the appliances and materials the builders are using, and chart out the overall cost.

Jennifer, Tech & Robotics Writer: I use Ideogram and Reve for newsletter images, and they’re impressively good even with minimal prompts. I’ll set a general style and tone, and they consistently deliver solid renderings of the tech personalities we cover — the style has become part of our storytelling.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to 10× your code output with Codex by setting it up in Cursor, running it in the cloud from anywhere (even your phone), and configuring an agent that automatically reviews your code for you.

Step-by-step:

  1. Install Codex by going to the Codex quickstart, selecting your IDE (Cursor), and launching a new Codex Agent inside that editor

  2. Ask Codex to generate an agents.md file from your project (or a PRD/spec if starting fresh), then initialize Git so Codex understands your codebase, rules

  3. Explore slash commands (like /review, /status, and /context) to review changes, manage context, and control how Codex reasons across your files

  4. Push the project to GitHub and connect it to Codex to access from anywhere, and enable automatic PR reviews so every pull request is reviewed in the cloud

Pro tip: Code locally in Cursor, then hand off reviews to cloud Codex — cloud runs don’t count against your local usage.

PRESENTED BY GURU

The Rundown: Guru is the AI Source of Truth that connects all of your company’s tools and delivers cited, permission-aware answers everywhere you work. With one governed knowledge layer powering both your people and your AIs, teams move faster — with fewer blind spots and mistakes.

Guru allows you to:

  • Connect all knowledge with permission-aware access

  • Get trusted, cited answers in chat and everywhere else you work

  • Experience knowledge that improves and verifies itself

ELON MUSK & OPENAI

Image source: Screenshots from X, OpenAI

The Rundown: Elon Musk and OpenAI continued to spar ahead of their April trial, with Musk sharing anecdotes from Greg Brockman’s 2017 private journal and Sam Altman accusing Musk of "cherry-picking" and OAI releasing correspondence of its own.

The details:

  • The file details Brockman’s convo with Ilya Sutskever on OAI’s structure and their desire to become a B-Corp, along with concerns over Musk’s involvement.

  • Altman posted notes of Musk wanting to “accumulate $80B for a self-sustaining city on Mars” and a succession plan for his children to control AGI.

  • OpenAI published a blog of its own highlighting context and discrepancies between Musk’s filing and Brockman’s notes, calling it “The truth Elon left out”.

  • Musk tweeted, "Can't wait to start the trial. The discovery and testimony will blow your mind", and is reportedly seeking $134B in damages in the lawsuit.

Why it matters: Get the popcorn ready, folks. If the early discovery nuggets are any indication, we're in for the messiest, most expensive AI lawsuit ever — and a front-row seat to the origin story of tech's biggest current arch-rivalry. Both sides clearly think the full record helps them, which means April is about to get VERY entertaining.

QUICK HITS

  • 🧠 Scroll.ai - Turn any knowledge base into enterprise-grade chatbots, with accuracy and depth far beyond generic models*

  • 💼 Claude Cowork - Claude Code’s agentic abilities, now available to Pro tier

  • ⚙️ Replit - New capabilities to easily build and deploy mobile apps

  • 📸 FLUX.2 Klein - BFL’s new ultra-fast, powerful AI image editing model

*Sponsored Listing

Black Forest Labs released FLUX.2[klein], a new speed-focused variant of the company’s powerful AI editing model.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that China’s models “may be only a matter of months behind” U.S. labs, but have yet to show innovation surpassing the frontier.

Elon Musk announced that xAI’s Colossus 2 supercomputer powering Grok is now live, marking the world’s first operational gigawatt cluster in the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced new AI partnerships with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral, enabling training on the company’s 65M+ articles.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar published a blog revealing the company hit $20B+ in annualized revenue for 2025, tripling YoY, with compute expanding 10x since 2023.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Forest in Texas:

"I was sick of ‘Scam Likely’ ruining my dinner. So, instead of getting mad, I got even. I built a digital bodyguard named Forest. He uses OpenAI and a custom voice model to sound exactly like a confused elderly man.

His instructions are simple: be polite, be interested, but never, ever let them close the deal. The Outcome: Sweet, sweet revenge. I get to listen to recordings of scammers losing their minds arguing with an AI about armadillos, and I didn't have to lift a finger."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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