I think a lot of people are missing the fact that this is for the free tier, not their subscriptions.

OpenAI has an unbelievable number of free users. People paying $20 a month or more are in the minority.

It’s not cheap to serve LLMs to hundreds of millions of users for free. They either cut the free tier or add ads to cover the costs.

Extrapolations about OpenAI being in dire financial straights are generally coming from people who don’t understand the extreme scale of their free plan or who didn’t read far enough to understand that the ads aren’t going into the $20 plan everyone knows.