The End of AI’s Idealistic Youth

Ads that aren’t ads? “Adult” ChatGPT? Yup, AI is entering its awkward adolescence.

We’re living in the golden age of AI. Not of its capabilities – that isn’t here yet. The golden age I’m talking about is this time when AI companies haven’t yet really started to monetize their tools. You can use any of the major LLMs today and feel pretty insulated from the commercial realities of this multi-trillion-dollar technological revolution.

Yes, there have been obvious moments when the ugly face of commerce has shown itself in our interactions with AI – think Perplexity’s deal with PayPal earlier this year that allowed its users to engage in one-click shopping from the “answer engine’s” interface, or the nickel-and-diming that happens when you go over your allotted number of tokens.

But for the most part, these early days of AI have been devoid of obvious and intrusive commercialization efforts. The big players like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic have been content to charge people monthly fees for their products, but that’s not really working and the hole in the bottom of the money bucket is getting bigger by the second.

So what’s an IPO-hungry CEO to do? One word: MONETIZE!

And it’s starting to happen more often and more obviously. For example, OpenAI recently started testing in-context ads in ChatGPT, then strangely tried to claim they weren’t actually ads. And last week Google announced that it is bringing ads to Gemini in 2026.

Now look, I’m not a Pollyanna optimist who thinks AI can be funded the way it currently is and achieve everything we’ve been told to expect from this tech boom (bubble?). But is it asking too much for the people building these tools to think creatively about ways to pay for this without burying us in yet more digital ads that no one really wants?

Sam Altman himself is on record just last December as saying that “ads-plus-AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me." Of course that unsettled feeling only lasted about 10 months.

When the Myth Meets the Product Roadmap

Part of what makes this moment so jarring is the contrast between the story we’ve been told and the products being released every week.

The story is mythic: AI will reshape how we learn, work, and create. It’s framed as infrastructure for human progress — closer to electricity or the internet than to another app.

What do we get instead? An adult version of ChatGPT.

On its own, an age-gated or adult-oriented AI product is entirely rational. It expands the market, avoids regulatory pitfalls, and monetizes demand that already exists. But symbolically, it’s a little (OK, a lot) cringe.

When a company talks about reshaping human cognition and then launches an adult-themed chatbot, it feels like they’ve lost their way to the vision – or, worse, that the vision was BS all along.

The Business Reality No One Can Avoid

Whether you agree with “adult” ChatGPT or not, the fact that OpenAI has chosen to go there signals a very simple truth: running large-scale AI systems is brutally expensive and the current subscription model won’t fund the future that’s been promised.

This is why monetization conversations keep circling back to advertising and commerce. Not because these companies are suddenly in love with ads, but because ads are familiar, scalable, and legible to investors.

Perplexity’s evolution is a good example. By leaning into product discovery and purchase-ready answers, it’s effectively becoming a shopping engine — not through banners or pop-ups, but by owning the moment when intent turns into action.

If you control that moment, you don’t need ads. You are the ad network.

Why This Feels Different

Advertising has always been part of the internet. But AI changes the emotional contract.

Search engines answer queries.
Social platforms interrupt attention.
AI systems participate in thinking.

They help us reason through choices, frame problems, explore ideas, and, increasingly, make decisions. That makes monetization feel different — more intimate, more consequential. In the examples I’ve seen where ChatGPT users have encountered one of the test ads, their reactions are emotional, as if they’ve been tricked or lied to. It’s a very human reaction to something done by a non-human technology.

If you’re going to reshape how people think, decide, learn, and buy, then you owe us better monetization creativity than banners and sponsored answers.

Not because ads are evil. But because influence, when embedded into something people trust, deserves more care than we’ve historically given it.

The Beginning of AI’s Awkward Adolescence

Every transformative technology gets a brief period where it feels untouched by the messiness of business. A moment when possibility outweighs practicality. When ideals are still intact.

That’s where AI has been living. But youth doesn’t last forever.

As AI systems move closer to the center of how we think, learn, decide, and buy, the economics can no longer be deferred. Compute costs don’t care about mission statements. Investors don’t wait patiently for enlightenment. And users — millions of them — have already shown they’re not willing to pay enough to fund the future we’ve been promised.

So the compromises begin, which doesn’t mean that AI has failed. It just means it’s growing up. And we all know how awkward adolescence can be.