OpenAI has a history of not generating any revenue. It’s great at hauling in investor funding (for now), but revenue generation remains a mystery to the company. That could be why the artificial intelligence specialist is looking to take a cut of sales made through its ChatGPT tool.
The Financial Times reports that Altman’s company intends to implement a checkout system that will permit users to conclude sales without exiting ChatGPT. There are a couple of benefits to this — sellers remove a step to purchase, while OpenAI gets a piece of the action.
OpenAI’s offer
Which, if you think about it, isn’t that dissimilar to how the classical Mafia operates. You’re presented with a compelling choice that (perhaps) isn’t your first choice, and the background group gets a little off the top. But since that applies to Google, Apple, and any other platform that says “give me 30% of your revenue”, OpenAI is in appropriately extortionist company.
The information about ChatGPT’s change comes via “multiple people familiar with the proposals”. The company will extract money from sellers on its platform by way of a commission for sales made, though how much the AI giant wants isn’t final.
Recently, OpenAI teamed up with Shopify, the payments platform powering a considerable number of web stores, so it’s conceivable that this is the first place the ‘feature’ will appear. It already displays links to products but dispatches users to the source instead of keeping them in ChatGPT.
The move makes sense from a revenue perspective, though it does seem as though AI is speedrunning the transition from ‘interesting service’ to ‘advertising-ridden craphole’ with remarkable rapidity. It took Facebook, Instagram, and Google several years to set their products on fire in the search for more ad or sales revenue, while OpenAI appears bent on doing it quicker than anyone else, ever.
Provided the initiative gets off the ground. The Financial Times points out that integrating payments in ChatGPT is still in development. Implementation could change before anything rolls out, with the feature’s final appearance still uncertain.
