OpenAI’s Ad Hoc 🤖🧾

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the leak that suggests adverts will soon be part of the ChatGPT experience. It feels logical, especially as OpenAI needs to find ways to pay for all that compute, but there are questions over what it could mean for AI objectivity. We also have news on a change of AI leadership at Apple, we pore over Black Friday sales figures, highlight an AI bot that only deals in provable truths, and bring you all the latest from 3Advance.

🎬 Our Top Take

🤖💬 OpenAI – Leaked Plans Suggest Ads Are Coming to ChatGPT

For all Mark Zuckerberg’s side quests, Meta is an advertising company, with around 98% of its revenue coming from ads. While Google has more tangible success with other products, like Pixel, 75% of its revenues come from ads. If these two companies are pillars of the modern web, then it’s natural to suggest that a company that wants to become a new pillar, OpenAI, would follow suit, especially when 95% of its users don’t pay for its core product. We have had confirmation of that after a long era of speculation – OpenAI is testing ads in ChatGPT. This could, of course, change the economics of the web, and it could be a life-saver for a now-for-profit company that is light years away from making any, but it throws up interesting structural and ethical questions. First, what will the ads look like? Will they load on the screen for a few seconds while ChatGPT is “thinking,” or will they live permanently on the sidebar? Clearly, they could be integrated into AI search, but that raises questions about the reliability of objective query results. Some, like Tech Radar, have opined that ads would be welcomed (or at least tolerated) if they were targeted and relevant, something that is easy to do given ChatGPT's intimate knowledge of you. Yet not everyone likes being targeted. Finally, there’s the slightly-frightening-but-hopefully-unlikely prospect of ads being woven into conversations & answers. To be clear, none of this is a criticism of OpenAI. Many experts believed it was inevitable and logical, and both Google and Microsoft are also busy testing ads for Gemini and Copilot. But the ‘how’ is much more important than the ‘why’ here, and it’s all the more intriguing. #AIAds Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Wolfram|Alpha

Going by mainstream media tech coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, and a couple of others are the only AI bots in town. Yet, there are companies carving a niche with a different spin on the all-knowing bot. One such example is Wolfram|Alpha, an AI bot that deals exclusively in facts, not opinion or conjecture. It does not search the web for answers, but does “dynamic computations” to provide expert knowledge on everything from elementary math to political history. There is a free version, but it has paid plans, including specific plans for students and educators. Check it out on Google Play here and the App Store here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: $11.8B

📈📉 Black Friday – Online Sales Break Yet Another Record

It’s hardly mind-blowing to read that 2025 Black Friday sales have hit a record – they seem to do it every year. Yet, Adobe’s data on this week’s sales is fascinating: One trillion visits to US retail websites in 24 hours!! US sales topped $11.8B, with more than that expected yesterday for Cyber Monday. Globally, spending reached around $80 billion (data from Salesforce), and AI was said to have influenced around $22 billion of that total. Anecdotally, we’d say firms are so much better at nudging us to spend, too. How many emails and push notifications did you get containing “Black Friday” in the subject line? We lost count. #HolidaySales Read more here. 

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

Last week we launched Shift. This was after nine months of development – the infrastructure, the core API, the web directory, and the mobile apps. But as we say all the time, it’s not an app, it’s a business. Today, as Co-Founder of Shift, Paul explains how the 3Advance team focuses on how we fulfill the mission. You should always “start with why” and have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. The team here are experts in the “how”. Darren and Paul obsess over it. Acquisition. Retention. Monetization. We ARM entrepreneurs with the tools, tech, and most importantly, the team to realize a strategy and then execute. Get a peek behind the curtains of this year’s biggest launch. And get your Irish-on.