OpenAI is staffing up to turn ChatGPT into an ad platform (searchengineland.com)

OpenAI is quietly assembling a growth engineering team to turn ChatGPT into a paid advertising platform. A recent job listing for a “Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer” describes building campaign management tools, APIs, data pipelines, real-time attribution/reporting, integrations with major ad platforms, and experimentation frameworks — essentially the MarTech backbone needed to let brands buy, run and measure campaigns inside ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly-user surface. Fidji Simo is recruiting leadership for the effort, and reports suggest OpenAI aims to monetize free users with ads by 2026. For the AI/ML community this signals more than a new revenue stream: it demands scalable, low-latency data infrastructure, robust online experimentation and attribution systems, and model-level controls for personalization, content safety and ad relevance. Engineers will need to reconcile real-time signals with privacy and regulatory constraints, integrate external ad-buying APIs, and instrument A/B and causal testing that tie conversational outcomes to business KPIs. If realized, the product could let advertisers input goals and have ChatGPT autonomously plan, buy and measure campaigns — creating new opportunities and technical challenges around measurement, privacy, model alignment and commercialized conversational experiences.