ChatGPT Gets Ads Starting Today

Plus, Elon's xAI Gets $3.4B for AI Chips

February 09, 2026

Welcome back, AI Admirers!

Breaking News: ChatGPT is now showing ads to free users and people with basic subscriptions. You'll see these ads at the bottom of your conversations, but OpenAI says they won't change the answers you get.

Get ready to dive into the latest happenings in AI.

📢 Today's Headline:

  • ChatGPT Now Has Ads — Starting Today!

  • Anthropic Raises $20B in New Funding!

  • Snapchat's New "I Arrived Safely" Feature!

  • $3.4B Nvidia Chip Deal for xAI!

  • Latest AI Tools & Resources!

  • Today’s Poll and Results!

Read time: 3.5 minutes!

Free Playbook for Startup

You’re shipping features. Iterating daily. Managing the team.

But your customers aren’t chasing you — yet.

Building faster doesn’t equal Product-Market Fit. The Launch EEC Playbook shows what really drives pull, why your current approach might be failing, and the practical steps to start attracting real demand.

Hand-picked News

The twist?
OpenAI’s own CEO criticized the feature his company just launched.

Sam Altman called the ads “deceptive” on X — while they were rolling out to millions of users. That’s not a small PR mistake. That’s internal confusion going public.

And it’s not just free users.
Even paid “Go” subscribers are seeing ads.
So you’re paying… and still getting promotions in your chats.

Now a new model is dropping this week.
Perfect timing — upgrade or distraction?

Even weirder: the rollout started during the Super Bowl.
OpenAI spent big on ads for a feature their own CEO doesn’t seem to support.

They say ads won’t affect answers or privacy.
But the optics? Not great.

⚠️ Watch for: Whether this drives actual user exodus or if people just shrug and keep using it. Google proved we'll tolerate a lot for convenience. OpenAI is betting you will too.

Try this now: Check your ChatGPT settings to see if you're in the test group. If ads are showing up, you'll see them labeled at the bottom of responses.

Anthropic’s fundraising got so hot, they doubled their target mid-round.

They raised $13B in September — and burned it so fast they needed another $20B within months.

And it’s not VCs paying.
It’s Nvidia and Microsoft — their own compute providers.
Basically pre-paying for future infrastructure.

Now Anthropic and OpenAI are both eyeing summer IPOs.

Competing in AI now costs tens of billions a year.

đź‘€ Watch for: Whether these IPOs actually happen this summer. If Anthropic and OpenAI both go public in the same window, it'll be the biggest test yet of whether public markets believe AI hype or AI fundamentals.

Try this now: If you're building with AI APIs, lock in your pricing agreements before these companies go public. Post-IPO pressure to show revenue could mean price hikes.

Snapchat just made location sharing frictionless — and way more normal.

Snap Map now has 400M monthly users casually sharing their whereabouts.
That’s bigger than the entire U.S. population. Not niche anymore.

The twist: it’s recurring.
Set “Tuesday yoga” once, and friends get alerts every week.
It’s passive, always-on tracking.

It now competes with Life360 and Apple’s Find My —
but wins because your friends are already on Snapchat.

It’s framed as safety (and it can be).
But when sharing becomes default, opting out starts to look suspicious.

⚠️ Watch for: Whether this becomes the new social norm for Gen Z relationships and friendships. If "share your location with me" becomes table stakes for trust, we're entering a very different era of digital intimacy and surveillance.

Try this now: If you use Snapchat, check your Snap Map settings. Location sharing is opt-in, but the new recurring alerts make it sticky once enabled. Make sure you're intentional about who sees your movements.

Quick Hits

🔥 New Tools & Resources

🔥 rivva - AI Schedule & Planner | Your Day, Planned Around Your Energy.

🔥 OpenAI Frontier - Operate AI coworkers on a single enterprise platform.

🔥 Gamma - Create unlimited presentations, websites, and more in seconds. Everything you need to quickly create and refine content with AI.

🔥 Unlimited Prompts - Get 10k+ ChatGPT prompts now.

🔥 Unicorne - The 20 fastest growing startups based on TrustMRR data.

Learning Spotlight

A Practical Approach to AI-Based Planning Methods

What you’ll learn:

  • Machine Learning: Apply Linear Regression and SVM for real-world regression and classification.

  • Expert Systems: Explain architecture, functionality, and role in knowledge-based decision-making.

  • AI Problem-Solving: Implement Means-End Analysis and Goal Stack Planning for automated reasoning.

  • Classical AI Planning: Represent and plan structured problems (e.g., Block World).

  • Planning Techniques: Evaluate and apply methods in deterministic, goal-driven environments.

  • Hybrid Systems: Integrate ML and AI planning to build systems that learn and plan to achieve goals.

🚨 Quick Poll

Today’s Poll:

Will ads in ChatGPT make you switch to a paid plan or another AI tool?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Vote today, see the results tomorrow!

Previous Poll:

Will tools like OpenAI Frontier make it easier for businesses to automate real work tasks?

  • A) Yes — It’ll simplify automation 🛠️ – 66% 🏆

  • B) No — It’ll still be too complex đźš« - 34%

SPECIAL BONUS

The smartest minds don’t waste time on newspapers.

They read newsletters - curated, ad-free, straight to the point.

Want in?

Get premium news for FREE with the Meco app!