Why I Deleted ChatGPT After Three Years

OpenAI just announced ads in ChatGPT’s free tier.

To me, this is a deal-breaker.

Ads are a symptom, a confession: the math doesn’t work. OpenAI has raised $58 billion, has 800 million weekly users, and still can’t make the economics viable. Even $200/month Pro users lose them money.

If the leading AI company can’t survive without ads, who can?

OpenAI’s press release promises “responses won’t be influenced by ads.” But how would you know? You can’t audit training data. You can’t compare your answer to an ad-free version. You just have to trust them.

Their ad money lives in the gaps between what users will assume and what the company will effectively do (use your history to target ads even if advertisers don’t know how; post-train the model to benefit advertisers, etc.)

OpenAI is splitting users into two classes: the AI-rich and the AI-poor.

Paying users get their interests intact. Free users pay by letting someone else’s interests come first. The paid tiers are the control group. The free tiers are the rats in the maze.

Besides ads, ChatGPT is no longer what it used to be. There are better alternatives (Claude, Gemini). The sycophancy remains unsolved. Sam Altman says one thing, does another. It’s no longer essential in my toolkit.

For the first time since November 2022, I’ve deleted ChatGPT.