OpenAI Seems to Be Making a Very Familiar, Very Cynical Choice

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edgar albert guest Essay

By Vauhini Vara

Ms. Vara is a contributing writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age.”

Last spring, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, sat in the chancel of Harvard Memorial Church, sermonizing against advertising. “I will disclose, just as a personal bias, that I hate ads,” he began in his usual calm cadence, one sneakered foot crossed onto his lap. He said that ads “fundamentally misalign a user’s incentives with the company providing the service,” adding that he found the notion of mixing advertising with artificial intelligence — the product his company is built on — “uniquely unsettling.”

The comment reminded me immediately of something I’d heard before, from around the time I was first getting online. It came from a seminal paper that Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote in 1998, when they were at Stanford developing Google. They argued that advertising often made search engines less useful, and that companies that relied on it would “be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

I showed up at Stanford as a freshman in 2000, not long after Mr. Brin and Mr. Page had accepted a $25 million round of venture capital funding to turn their academic project into a business. My best friend there persuaded me to try Google, describing it as more ethical than the search engines that had come before. What we didn’t realize was that in the midst of the dot-com crash, which coincided with our arrival, Google’s investors were pressuring the co-founders to hire a more experienced chief executive.

Mr. Brin and Mr. Page brought in Eric Schmidt, who in turn hired Sheryl Sandberg, the chief of staff to Lawrence H. Summers when he was Treasury secretary, to build an advertising program. Filing for Google to go public a couple of years later, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page explained away the reversal of their anti-advertising stance by telling shareholders that ads made Google more useful because they provided what the founders called “great commercial information.”

My senior year, news filtered into The Stanford Daily, where I worked, that Facebook — which some of us had heard about from friends at Harvard, where it had started — was coming to our campus. “I know it sounds corny, but I’d love to improve people’s lives, especially socially,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder, told The Daily’s reporter. He added, “In the future we may sell ads to get the money back, but since providing the service is so cheap, we may choose not to do that for a while.”

Mr. Zuckerberg went on to quit Harvard and move to Palo Alto, Calif. I went on to The Wall Street Journal. Covering Facebook in 2007, I got a scoop that Facebook — which had in fact introduced ads — would begin using data from individual users and their “friends” on the site to sharpen how ads were targeted to them. Like Google before it, Facebook positioned this as being good for users. Mr. Zuckerberg even brought Ms. Sandberg over from Google to help. When an economic downturn, followed by an I.P.O., later put pressure on Facebook, it followed Google’s playbook: doubling down on advertising. In this case, it did so by collecting and monetizing even more personal information about its users.

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