OpenAI Announces Details of New Advertising System Developed for ChatGPT

OpenAI has announced that it has built a new advertising infrastructure for the ChatGPT platform that follows conversational context, unlike traditional search-based systems. Based on a specially trained language model, this system operates independently of response generation to maintain the neutrality of both ads and chats.

While traditional advertising systems respond to discrete intent units such as instant searches and page views, user intent in ChatGPT evolves and changes over multiple turns of conversation. For this new paradigm, OpenAI has built an ad delivery system based on a custom, fine-tuned frontier model that handles retrieval, ranking, relevance, and bidding processes. The new ad infrastructure is based on three core design decisions: stateful ad sessions that allow information flow to be remembered across sessions and conversations, a custom language model that selects ads by interpreting conversational context, and running the ad selection process in a separate service from response generation to prevent ads from influencing ChatGPT's neutral voice.

It was reported that the system reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in less than 200 days after launch, and more than 100,000 advertisers have run ads on ChatGPT since its launch.