How OpenAI Built a Billion-Dollar Ad Engine

0:00More and more, athletes are using AI to help achieve at the highest levels, and the same AI tools are helping boost outcomes for leaders and entrepreneurs. To learn how AI is helping build winners on and off the field, search for AI that means business wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, September 18. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. AI voice-cloning tools have gotten so good that they can now replicate accents where I'm packing wire accents might be a security vulnerability. Then open AI CEO Sam Altman once called the combination of ads and AI, quote, uniquely unsettling. Now the tech giant is pushing full speed ahead into the advertising world. We'll dive into the company's ad rush. Up first, say you get a call out of the blue from someone claiming to be from your bank.

1:00You might be skeptical, but what if the caller sounded just like you? New research shows that generative AI tools can now mimic distinct regional accents, using as little as 10 seconds of audio scraped from social media, podcasts, and other online sources. And apparently, that subtle sense of familiarity is often all it takes to lower our defenses. Drittle contributor Heidi Mitchell sat down with us to explain why that is, and how you can protect yourself from scams. Heidi, tell us more about this new research on how good people are at differentiating between AI and humans. So when we hear something that sounds familiar, we just assume that it's real, especially if we have a super specific accent. They spoke to this guy in Scotland. He had 150 people participate in this study, and he told them, you're going to listen to these sentences, and tell me if they're AI or if they're human. And they thought, overwhelmingly, they really thought that it was human when it sounded Scottish.

2:04And then when it sounded Dundonian Scottish, which is practically like another language, they really thought it was a human, because they thought how in the world could someone, I mean, 30% of the city of Dundee speaks this dialect. Even when he gave him warnings, they were believing that the Dundonian accent was trustworthy. Your story also notes that people can be more easily tricked into trusting a voice that sounds like their own accent. Can you tell us more about that? So an interesting other piece of research that I stumbled upon in working on this piece is this researcher, she looked at 14 episodes of Shark Tank, and she analyzed the vocal expression of each of those pictures that are pitching to those sharks. And she found that the closer that the entrepreneur sounded to one of the panelists, the more likely that panelist is going to make a deal. So it's like, you sound like me, I trust you, I'm going to give you my money.

3:04So then marrying these two studies together, what does it mean that we're falling for these AI voices? I mean, unfortunately, I think it means we're at the risk of falling for scams more. They can just scale these things up and test them really quickly. Remembering, though, that scammers don't want to spend a lot of money on any one person. So they're just going to try and blank it as many people as they can. But basically, I think what it's going to come down to, according to the cyber experts, though, we're going to have to really think about the story that they're telling rather than the voice they're telling it in. Because they'll be able to sound just like your sister, just like your aunt, just like your daughter. And we are going to need to think, oh, does that make sense? What they're asking me to do? Is that something that she would say? And maybe just hang up and call that person back or text somebody else on a different channel so that you're not following the directions that they ask you to do. Because also, when somebody calls you with a scam and it sounds like your mom, which is a pretty common scam these days, your fear kicks in and so you don't think so critically. You're more likely to react.

4:09So we always want to tell people to slow it down. Think through this is a legitimate story that they're telling me and it's challenging. That was WSJ contributor Heidi Mitchell. Have you ever come across an AI voice scam? If you're a listener on Spotify, let us know in the comments. Coming up, OpenAI has been making a massive ad push ahead of its widely anticipated public debut. But how is it going for the company and for advertisers? More after the break. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, and the routine tasks they can hand off. And nobody understands that better than Nutsweet. That's why they put together a free expert guide you need to grab today. Aligning for the agentic era, how AI is changing everyday work. Download it and you'll see exactly how AI is reshaping work across every part of your organization and how to

5:12make sure you come out ahead. Get your free guide at netsuite.com slash wall street netsuite.com slash wall street. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wasn't always sold on the idea of putting ads into chatGPT. This is what he had to say about it a couple of years back speaking at Harvard Business School. I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. But today, he's changed his tune. OpenAI has been rolling out ads on its flagship product, ChatGPT, since February. And it's been building out this new part of its business at a dizzying speed. WSJA advertising editor Suzanne Reniza joins us now to unpack OpenAI's ad rollout. It's growing pains and what it means for the tech giants hotly anticipated IPO. Suzanne, can you start by telling us what OpenAI's ad business looks like? It depends on the day. The ad business is changing so quickly. We haven't really seen anything or

6:14any build on an ad platform this quick. The business right now, the way it started off was very basic and that was just seven months ago in February. And the way it works is when you're using ChatGPT after you have a conversation at the very bottom, you'll see a box that has ad attached to it. And it's pretty much a plain text box with a picture. They introduce a carousel. Well, you might see multiple pictures and different products from the same company and the one ad. But that's basically what this thing is and they've been rolling it out. They're now in 50 countries. And every day, they update their systems. They're adding new tools. So it's maturing pretty quickly and they're working at sort of brick next beat to get this done. So just to dive into the tech behind it all for a bit is OpenAI just utilizing browser cookies to sort of determine which ads to serve to each individual user? So no, they're not really using browser cookies to determine what

7:16ads to show. The way it works is the ads are served based on the intent or basically the signals that the system is getting from the types of questions and conversation that person is having with ChatGPT. So for an example, if I'm on ChatGPT and I'm looking for the best places to visit to find the most pristine beaches per se, OpenAI's technology looks at all the signals within my conversation and then it has a raft of advertisers that are in the system and they insert keywords and phrases and the technology picks out which ad to put at the bottom of this conversation that is the most relevant to the subject matter that the person's discussing. So obviously, if I'm in there talking about beaches, you might have the system serves you an ad from an expedient or a hotel that's on a Rubas beaches or something similar. Suzanne, you've covered the ad industry for

8:18decades now. Is there anything that you noticed is unique about the way OpenAI is using ads? What's very interesting about when they launched is they hired a ton of meta executives, both on the tech side of the red business and their sales side and they're following a playbook, they're building the meta system and the Google system and you can see it and what's interesting is all the BAP technology seems to be the same but what's happened even just this week, they actually are coming out with new ad opportunities which are definitely outside of what we've seen before. So they began testing a couple of weeks ago ads that felt very native to the platform and these are called sponsored agents. So the ad appears as I described at the bottom and when the person clicks on it, they're not actually sent to a company's website. What happens is another chat G.P.T. conversation pops up and this is a branded one. So this allows me as the user to have

9:20a conversation with an agent that's been said all the information about the advertisers so that I can query about a product. And how well would you say OpenAI's advertisement business is doing so far? Well, it just hit an annualized one rate of a billion dollars a couple of weeks ago in August, which doesn't mean there's a billion dollars in the bank by any stretch. It means if they continue at this pace, they're going to hit that billion dollar figure in a year. Now that's probably faster than most ad businesses we've ever seen being created and as much as they're celebrating over there, it is a little shy of what others had expected. Some analysts thought it would be higher, but it's still early days and advertisers are not thrilled yet because the ads where they sit are very low in the page and feel very disjointed from the conversation at the top. But it's not unheard of that there's a slow build here and that they're having sort of mixed results. Facebook in the early days right before their IPO had many advertisers that actually thought Facebook

10:24advertising didn't work. Some big advertisers like GM pulled out weeks before their IPO and look at that ad business today. It's second largest in the world. Speaking of IPOs, OpenAI has a much anticipated public debut now expected next year. How important is its ad business for that IPO? What's that stake if OpenAI doesn't get its ad business right? The stakes are huge. They need money to offset the cost of its free version of the service. They now have over a billion weekly users. And so taking advantage of this consumer popularity they have across the board, advertising is the one area that they can do that with. That was WSJ Advertising Editor, Suzanne Renita. And that's it for tech news briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by me, Julie Chang, Jessica Fenton and Michael Laval wrote R.C Music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muzlim. Chris Sinsley is the deputy editor. Lee Tom Moulade is our senior director of

11:30shows. And Samantha Henneg is the Wall Street Journal's head of multimedia. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening. Pro's number one most trusted app based on August 2025 proprietary survey. Over 500,000 new listings every month based on average new for sale and rental listings. July 2024 to June 2025.