Big week!
On Friday evening (UK time) OpenAI announced that it is going to start testing ads in ChatGPT in the US for Free and Go subscribers (a new, cheaper tier they also launched on Friday). Anthropic also launched Cowork this week, a new productivity assistant mode in the Claude Mac app that looks incredibly impressive. Apple announced that it is partnering with Google to power their next generation of Siri and there’s a new Gemini beta feature that will allow it to be a much more personal and proactive assistant.
There are some good Long Reads this week too with The AI Manager’s Schedule from ignorance.ai that is a good companion piece to Anthropic’s launch of Claude Cowork and an article from The Verge on why Gemini is winning.
OpenAI starts testing ads in ChatGPT
This is a big one, and something that the marketing industry has been waiting for/expecting for a long time! OpenAI announced on Friday evening (UK time) that it’s going to start testing ads in the coming weeks for logged in adults in the U.S. on the free and Go tiers. They’re not launching ads yet, just testing for now.
OpenAI’s reasoning for testing ads is that they want to make sure that everyone on their platform has the opportunity to “have a personal super-assistant that helps them learn and do almost anything“. They want more people to benefit from their tools with fewer usage limits and without having to pay.
Test ads will appear at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on a user’s current conversation. Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from the content from ChatGPT and users will be able to learn more about why they see particular ads, or dismiss any ad and tell OpenAI why. Also, ads won’t be shown to under 18s or appear near sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health or politics.
OpenAI’s ads principles
OpenAI has very publicly shared the principles that they have put in place whilst developing the advertising product on ChatGPT and that will continue to guide them as they develop ads further:
Mission alignment: Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible.
Answer independence: Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled.
Conversation privacy: We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.
Choice and control: You control how your data is used. You can turn off personalisation, and you can clear the data used for ads at any time. We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free.
Long-term value: We do not optimise for time spent in ChatGPT. We prioritise user trust and user experience over revenue.
OpenAI says it plans to share more about how brands can advertise within ChatGPT in the coming weeks, and I’ll share more thoughts and information over the coming weeks as we learn more.
Alongside this, OpenAI Also expanded ChatGPT Go worldwide, which is their lower cost subscription model that they had been testing in India to great success. ChatGPT Go is $8 per month and it gives free users access to a larger context window, more file uploads, and more image generations. You can see a comparison between all the different plans now available here.
Anthropic wants you to use Claude to ‘Cowork’ in latest AI agent push
This looks incredibly impressive and if Simon Willison’s first impressions are anything to go by as well, I think we’ll see OpenAI and Google quickly come to the table with their own versions of this too.
Sadly I haven’t been able to try Claude Cowork out for myself yet as a bug (logged with Anthropic) is preventing me from getting it up and running on my Mac, but from what I’ve seen from other people’s experiences, I’m very excited about this. Cowork has the potential to turn Claude from a chat experience into a proper assistant that can help me across a wide range of tasks and stop me from constantly copy/pasting, attaching files, searching for things and all the other peripheral admin that goes hand-in-hand with working inside a generative AI chat interface currently.
I think a lot of businesses will get a lot of value out of Claude Cowork when they start to deploy it, connect it to internal knowledge bases, and start building out proprietary skills for it (which is very easy!). This is definitely one to experiment with and keep an eye on.
Apple picks Google’s Gemini AI for its big Siri upgrade
So, Apple has chosen Google to power their next generation of Siri and to not go with solely in-house developed AI models or to extend their partnership with OpenAI, who apparently turned down this opportunity.
Announced on Monday, this is a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. Details are thin on the ground, which is to be expected at the stage, and I think we’ll hear much more about this at WWDC 26 this summer.
There’s a good article from the FT around this that’s worth checking out here.
Gemini’s new beta feature provides proactive responses based on your photos, emails, and more
This is a really interesting new beta feature in Gemini - allowing it to understand the broader context of all of your Google content without being told where to look. Google call it Personalised Intelligence.
I’ve written previously about how AI assistants need to become more personalised and proactive, and this is a step in that direction. I think these features are important to make AI assistants much more useful in our day-to-day lives, but this obviously needs careful balancing with privacy features and ensuring that the user is in control at all times.
With Personalised Intelligence, connecting your Google data to Gemini is off by default and users decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off at anytime. This hasn’t had much attention this week, but I think this is going to be huge for Google. Not only will it make Gemini much more useful, but it’s something that only really Google can deliver on, so could be a big differentiator for them in the future.
Web 4.0
Publishers fear AI search summaries and chatbots mean ‘end of traffic era’
Google and Walmart Join Forces to Shape the Future of Retail
AI Ethics News
Sadiq Khan to urge ministers to act over ‘colossal’ impact of AI on London jobs
X still allowing users to post sexualised images generated by Grok AI tool
West Midlands police chief apologises after AI error used to justify Maccabi Tel Aviv ban
Anthropic announces Claude for Healthcare following OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health reveal
Long Reads
Ignorance.ai - The AI Manager’s Schedule
The Verge - Gemini is winning
The Guardian - AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson