Google is in no rush to follow OpenAI down the advertising path, at least not inside its AI assistant.
Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said the company has “no plans” to introduce ads in Gemini, directly contrasting OpenAI’s newly announced move to begin testing ads in ChatGPT’s free and lower-cost tiers.
The comments came during a Sources live conversation on Tuesday, just days after OpenAI confirmed that advertising is coming to ChatGPT as it looks for new revenue streams to support its rapidly growing and expensive AI operations.
For Google, the roadmap is different. “We don’t have any plans to do that,” Hassabis said when asked about ads in Gemini. “I think we’re focusing on the core experience and the core technology of being a better assistant, first and foremost, in a much wider range of things and in more form factors.”
While OpenAI is pivoting to ad-supported models to offset massive compute costs, Google appears comfortable absorbing the costs of Gemini to protect the user experience.
A cautious view on ads in AI assistants
Beyond the financials, Hassabis highlighted a critical product philosophy: the potential conflict between advertising and the role of a “true universal assistant.” While OpenAI has emphasized that ads will not influence ChatGPT’s answers or rely on private conversations for targeting, Hassabis suggested the balance is delicate and easy to get wrong.
“If you want a true universal assistant that you can trust and is personal to you and has a lot of knowledge about you, I think you’d want to know for sure that the things it was recommending to you were genuinely good for you and unbiased and untainted,” he said. “And I think if you start mixing that with advertising, it could work, but you just have to be very careful about how that’s done. I think there are many ways that could be done badly.”
Those remarks stand in sharp contrast to OpenAI’s position. The company has framed ads as a necessary step to keep free access to ChatGPT viable, while promising strong guardrails around user privacy and response integrity.
Why Google can afford to wait
At a glance, Hassabis’ comment that OpenAI “maybe… feel[s] they need to make more revenue” sounds like a polite jab. But the underlying economics make the difference between Google and OpenAI hard to ignore.
Google doesn’t need to monetize Gemini immediately because its existing business is a juggernaut. The company generated roughly $74 billion in advertising revenue in a single quarter. OpenAI, by comparison, reportedly made around $5 billion in total revenue in Q4, while continuing to lose money on every dollar earned. Google’s ad business alone brings in more revenue in 90 days than OpenAI is expected to generate in an entire year.
In contrast, OpenAI is navigating a capital-intensive landscape with significant projected operating losses. As Sam Altman has previously admitted, “a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don’t want to pay.” Ads, in that light, are not a strategic luxury but a financial necessity for OpenAI.
For Google, Gemini acts as a defensive moat. Its primary job isn’t necessarily to generate new cash immediately, but to prevent ChatGPT from becoming the default interface for information, which would threaten Google’s core Search ads business. Google can afford to keep Gemini ad-free because every user retained in the Google ecosystem eventually interacts with their profitable services elsewhere.
It is a strategy reminiscent of Amazon’s approach to market dominance: survive the burn until the competition—who cannot lean on a $296 billion advertising empire—is forced to make difficult product compromises.
Still, none of this means Gemini will remain ad-free forever. Even Hassabis’ comments were carefully framed around current plans, not permanent principles. Gemini, like all large-scale AI systems, is deeply unprofitable today, both in capital expenditure and operating costs.
For Google, however, that is a manageable risk. If AI assistants never become directly profitable, Gemini can be written off as a costly but survivable investment. If competitors like OpenAI fade under financial pressure, Google would still be standing and free to monetize later, much as Amazon once did after years of prioritizing growth over profit.
For now, though, Google is content to play the long game. While OpenAI moves ahead with ads in ChatGPT, Google is betting that an ad-free Gemini focused on “the core experience” is the better way to keep users close and competitors at bay.
