Tech Brew Ride Home - Ads Come To ChatGPT

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Ads are finally coming to ChatGPT. Why everyone online can’t stop talking about going on Claude benders. Elon’s case against OpenAI moves forward again. The Thinking Machines saga roils on again. And the big movie about AI every is apparently watching. OpenAI brings advertising to ChatGPT in push for new revenue (FT) OpenAI's Revenue Soars Past $20 Billion After 233% Jump—But Explosive Growth Comes With Massive Compute Costs And A $17 Billion Burn Rate (Benzinga) Claude Is Taking the AI World by Storm, and Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away (WSJ) ‘No Reasons to Own’: Software Stocks Sink on Fear of New AI Tool (Bloomberg) Musk Seeks Up to $134 Billion Damages From OpenAI, Microsoft (Bloomberg) Thinking Machines Exodus Tests Investor Appetite for a $50 Billion Valuation (The Information) There’s a Hit Movie Set Deep Inside an AI Lab—and It Will Give You Goosebumps (WSJ) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home from Monday, January 19th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Ads are finally coming to chat GPT, why everyone online can't stop talking about going on clodbenders. Elon's case against Open AI moves forward again. The Thinking Machine saga roils on again. And the big movie about AI everyone is apparently watching. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. There's a lot of chatter about using AI agents right now, but no one seems to be talking about how these agents aren't always perfect. Sometimes they delete the wrong files or make changes you didn't authorize, and when that

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It is official. OpenAI plans to test ads below chat GPT replies for users of the free and go-tieres in the U.S. A source says OpenAI expects to make in the low billions of dollars from ads. in 2026 alone. Quoting the FT. The San Francisco headquartered company announced on Friday that it would begin testing adverts on its free chatbot and cheapest paid offering. The ads will appear at the bottom of chat GPT answers in the coming weeks.

OpenAI said the marketing messages will be clearly labeled and will appear if relevant to the query. The company led by chief executive Sam Altman is exploring new revenue streams that could help fund spending commitments of roughly $1.4 trillion on computing resources, over the next decade. OpenAI anticipates it will make low billions of dollars from advertising in 2026 and more each year thereafter, according to a person close to the company. In recent months, OpenAI has been enhancing the ability of chat GPT to store information from conversations that can later be retrieved to provide more personalized responses. The focus on memories provides a powerful

tranche of preferences which the company anticipates drawing on to tailor hyper-personalize advertising according to the person close to OpenAI. The company said personalization could be turned off and memories deleted. Earlier this week, Google launched personalized advertising into its AI mode in its search engine, which delivers bespoke discounts to users shopping on the platform. OpenAI is also working on other alternative business lines, including a suite of AI hardware devices, developing bespoke products for governments and businesses, and new shopping tools. It is also in early talks with investors regarding a new funding round that could raise about $80 billion, according to people familiar with the deal, end quote. A slightly different

angle now from Benzinga, which I'm sure is related to what we just spoke about. Quote, on Sunday, Open AI said that its annualized revenue run rate exceeded at $20 billion in 2025, a 233% increase from 2024, accelerating sharply from the prior year's growth when revenue rose from $2 billion in 2020 to $6 billion in 2024. This is never before seen growth at such scale, CFO Sarah Fryer said in a blog post. We firmly believe that more compute in these periods would have led to faster customer adoption and monetization, end quote. The company acknowledged that revenue growth has moved almost in lockstep with its expansion

in computing power, highlighting the infrastructure-heavy nature of generative AI. OpenAI said it increased compute capacity from 0.2 gigawatts in 2020, 0.6 gigawatts in 2024, reaching roughly 1.9 gigawatts in 2025, nearly a 10fold increase in two years. Revenue followed a similar trajectory, climbing from $2 billion to more than $20 billion over the same period. Compute grew 3x year-over-year or 9.5x from 2023 to 2025, the company said, adding, while revenue followed the same curve growing 3x year-over-year or 10x from 2023 to 2025, end quote. The company is reportedly burning more than $17 billion annually, and revenue from subscriptions alone may fall short of supporting its highly compute-intensive AI operations.

In December, it was reported that OpenAI was seeking to raise $100 billion at a valuation of $830 billion, largely to fund further compute expansion, end quote. But all of the discourse online is about clawed code and that clawed work thing. If you listen to today's Odd Lots podcast episode, it's all about this, though I've not had the chance to listen to that episode yet, quoting the journal. They call it getting clawed pilled. It's the moment software engineers, executives, and investors turn their work over to Anthropics Claude AI and then witness a thinking machine of shocking capability even in an age awash in powerful artificial intelligence tools. Many coders spent their holiday breaks on a so-called clawed bender, testing out the capabilities of the latest Anthropic. model, Claude Opus 4.5, which they used within a desktop coding tool called ClaudeCode. Tech companies have been incorporating codewriting AI into their workflows for years, and prior

models were often compared with a junior software developer. The buzz around Claude's latest incarnation is something different. Malte Uble is Chief Technology Officer at Vursell, which helps develop and host websites and apps for users of Claude Code and other such tools. He said he used the tool to finish a complex project in about a week that would have taken him about a year without AI. Ubel spent 10 hours a day on his vacation building new software and said each run gave him an endorphin rush akin to playing a Vegas slot machine.

The Claude Zeal has spread widely this month, even to non-engineers. Many took to social media to describe the process of building their first software program without ever having learned to code. And despite the code in the name, people are using Claude Code for everything from health data analysis to expense report compiling as well. Some described a feeling of awe, followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career. It's amazing and it's also scary, said Andrew Dukha, Chief Executive of Awakened Tax, a cryptocurrency tax platform.

Duka has been coding since he was in middle school. I spent my whole life developing this skill and it's literally one-shotted by Claude, end quote. Claude's total web audience more than doubled in December from the previous year and its daily unique visitors on desktop are up 12% globally year-to-date compared with last month, according to market intelligence companies, similar web and sensor tower respectively. The question for many is what happens next. The bigger story here is going to be when this goes beyond software engineering, said David Sue, chief executive of Retool, a business AI startup. Software engineers make up a tiny fraction of the U.S. labor force, but how far does it go, end quote. This is from Bloomberg. The release of a

new artificial intelligence tool from startup Anthropic on January 12th, rekindled fears about disruption that weighed on software makers in 2025. Turbautax owner into it tumbled 16% last week. It's worst since 2022, while Adobe and Salesforce, which makes customer relationship management software, both sank more than 11%. All told, a group of software as a service stocks tracked by Morgan Stanley is down 15% so far this year, following a drop of 11% in 2025. It's the worst start to a year since 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Anthropic News we got underlines how difficult it is to assess what growth can look like going forward, said Brian Wong, portfolio manager at Osterweiss Capital Management, which has

$7.9 billion in assets. The pace of change is about as fast as I can remember, and that makes things about as uncertain as I can remember. Anthropics Claude Co-Work Service, released as a research preview, can create a spreadsheet from screenshots or produce a draft report from an assortment of notes, according to the company. It was developed quickly, largely with AI. While unproven, the tool represents just the type of capabilities that investors have been fearing and reinforces bearish positions that are looking increasingly entrenched, according to Jordan Klein, a tech sector specialist at Mizu Securities. Many by-siders see no reasons to own software no matter how cheaper beaten down the stocks get,

Klein wrote in a January 14 note to clients. They assume zero catalysts for, for a re-rate exist right now, he said, referring to the potential for higher valuation multiples. Meanwhile, valuations for software companies keep getting cheaper. The Morgan Stanley basket is priced at 18 times earnings projected over the next 12 months, its cheapest on record, and well below an average of more than 55 times earnings over the past decade. The reason software companies had lofty multiples is because they were subscription-based with recurring revenue that you could extrapolate into the future almost forever, said Austrois Capital's Wong. It's hard. It's hard. to know what multiple they should be trading at if they're going up against AI agents that are

running 24-7 and have the ability to complete tasks with big projects getting done in a day, end quote. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.m.

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citing calculations by a financial economist expert witness, C. Paul Wazahn. The filing says Musk is entitled to a chunk of Open AI's current $500 billion valuation after he was done. defrauded of the $38 million in seed money he donated to OpenAI when he helped found the startup in 2015. OpenAI and Microsoft later disputed the calculations. Just as an early investor in a startup company may realize gains many orders of magnitude greater than the investor's initial investment, the wrongful gains that Open AI and Microsoft have earned, and which Mr. Musk is now entitled to disgorge, are much larger than Mr. Musk's initial contributions. Musk's lawyer Stephen Molo wrote.

Wazon, the expert witness, calculated the damages request by combining Musk's financial and non-monetary contributions, including technical and business advice to OpenAI, according to the filing. He figured that the wrongful gains total $65.5 billion to $109.43 billion for Open AI and $13.3 billion to $25.06 billion for Microsoft. Musk's filing says he also plans to seek punitive damages and possibly an injunction that the filing didn't describe, end quote. The information has an update on the whole thinking machines lab stuff and it continues to be messy. Quote, on Wednesday during an all-hands meeting at the AI startup at CEO Mira Moradi

announced that she had fired one of Thinking Machines co-founders, its chief technology officer Barrett Zoff, for poor performance and speaking with competitors, according to a person familiar with the matter. During the meeting, two more thinking machines researchers, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz dropped bombshells when they separately posted in the company Slack that they were quitting, the person said. This is Brian cutting in here. We already know that, but we didn't know the details of this happening all at the same time. Back to the quoting.

Marotti appeared to be taken aback after the messages from Mets and Schoenholz, according to the person, while some thinking machine staffers were stunned by the rapid fire disclosures of the three departures. By Thursday, two more thinking machine staffers, researcher Leah Guy, and engineer E.M. and O'Connell told colleagues that they, too, were leaving the company. Of the five departures, four have joined OpenAI. Ordinarily, the departure of about 5% of a startup staff, thinking machines employed roughly 100 people prior to the defections this week, wouldn't necessarily be a source of serious concern,

but those departures included two of the company's six co-founders and came after a third co-founder, Andrew Tollick, left for meta-platforms in the fall. The events rattled investors in thinking machines, according to some of them. It could make it difficult for the one-year-old startup, which has released only a single product so far, to complete an ambitious funding round that aims to value the company at $50 billion, more than five times its last round. That funding effort is likely to test whether a burst of employee turnover is sufficient to spook private investors and speculative AI startups. The company's existing investors include Andresen Horowitz, a cell and Nvidia, the AI chip giant. Thinking machines could seek funding from its existing investor base or new ones. One possibility is Google, which is the startup's primary cloud provider.

It wasn't so long ago that Miramirati was able to resist the kind of raids that OpenAI performed on Thinking Machines this week. She had recruited some of her former OpenAI colleagues with an unusual but attractive offer. Thinking machines stock options with strike prices near zero, which they could exercise nearly immediately after joining. Such an arrangement would have been particularly attractive to the founders and early employees who joined before investors valued it at 10, billion since their equity would have immediately been worth a lot more within weeks or months. Zoff was one of those early employees. He had joined as Thinking Machines chief technology officer after a multi-year career at OpenAI, during which he ran post-training, the crucial last step of model training, during which models are ready for release. And Marotti had managed to stave

off previous raids on her staff. Over the summer, Mata had offered multiple thinking machines researchers large compensation packages. Those researchers decline. Marotti looked like she had enough capital after raising $2 billion less than a year after starting the company, a nearly unprecedented level for a startup that hadn't released a product yet. Researchers who flocked to the lab in large part came due to Marotti, who was known at OpenAIA for her ability to wrangle researchers with big personalities. Thinking Machines leaders also told them that they'd be able to decide what lines of research they'd pursue and would face less bureaucracy compared to. do other larger AI labs, end quote. Finally today, let me tell you about a big hit AI movie.

Quoting the journal, if you could go back in time and document the Manhattan Project, how would you do it? That was the question, Demise Hasebis asked his favorite documentary filmmaker nearly a decade ago, long before artificial intelligence was the growth engine of the global economy, when the leader of Google DeepMind decided to give a movie director extraordinary access to one of the world's leading AI labs. He felt comfortable letting an outsider in on the company's secrets because he knew that Greg Coes had a deeply human measure of success when he makes movies. I want to make goosebumps, Coes told me. The Thinking Game is about both Google Deep Mind and the singular mind of Demise Hasebis, its co-founder and chief executive, who has devoted

his life to cracking the mysteries of intelligence. The film tracks his team's revolutionary work, predicting the structure of nearly all-known proteins, a breakthrough that was later rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It's both extremely nerdy and very watchable, even if all you know about proteins is that you should be eating more of them. It also turned out to be a massive hit. The documentary recently went on YouTube, and it's already nearing 300 million views. Is that as many as Mr. Beast, Coase said? In fact, that's more views than any Mr. Vease video racked up last year, including the YouTube star's most... popular stunt, I spent 100 hours inside the pyramids. As it happens, Coz spent hundreds of hours

inside another place of wonder. His timing couldn't have been any better. After shooting from 2018 to 24, the film went live on YouTube in late 2025 as Google was roaring back to life in the AI wars. In the past year, one of the world's most valuable companies has nearly doubled in value and Google's parent alphabet just became the latest tech giant to reach a market capitalization of $4 trillion. If you watch this documentary, you can begin to understand how it got. here, end quote. So that's a bit of something for you to do today if you've got today off of work. Usually I do take this holiday Monday off, but they sold ads for the whole week this week, so here we are. Talk to you tomorrow.

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