Welcome to your daily AI intelligence brief.

Let’s dive into what is unfolding in AI today, January 19th, 2026…

Let’s start with the big story of the last couple days… OpenAI announcing ads in ChatGPT.

The age of ad ree artificial intelligence just ended.

On January 16th, OpenAI announced it will begin testing advertisements within ChatGPT for U.S. users on its free and newly expanded "Go" tiers, marking the most significant shift in the platform's business model since its 2022 launch.

For investors, this isn't just a product update… it's a signal that the AI gold rush is entering its monetization phase.

With an estimated 800 million weekly active users and projected infrastructure costs of $1.4 trillion over the next decade, OpenAI needed a revenue engine that could scale beyond subscriptions alone.

How It Works…

Advertisements will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses when there's a relevant sponsored product or service based on the current conversation.

These "Sponsored Recommendations" will be clearly labeled and separated from organic answers. A user asking for keto dinner recipes might see an ad for avocado oil or grocery delivery services… highly targeted, contextually relevant, and potentially lucrative.

The company has drawn clear lines… Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will remain ad free, and users under 18 won't see any advertisements.

Sensitive topics including health, mental health, and politics are off-limits for ad placement.

The Financial Picture…

OpenAI's move comes as the company reportedly burns through capital at an extraordinary rate, with projections suggesting it could consume up to $115 billion by 2030.

Despite reaching $20 billion in annualized revenue, the subscription model alone couldn't support the massive computational demands of serving nearly a billion users while developing increasingly sophisticated AI models.

CEO Sam Altman, who previously called ads in AI "uniquely unsettling," appears to have made peace with necessity.

His recent statement was direct: "A lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don't want to pay, so we are hopeful a business model like this can work".

What This Means for Markets…

This pivot puts OpenAI in direct competition with Google's $200+ billion search advertising empire.

Microsoft, OpenAI's primary backer and cloud provider, stands to benefit significantly as advertising drives increased demand for Azure infrastructure.

NVIDIA remains the ultimate winner… more ads mean more compute power, which means more chips.

The losers? Traditional content publishers face further decline as AI provides direct, monetized answers without sending traffic to source websites.

The "Great Decoupling" just accelerated.

The Bottom Line…

OpenAI's advertising test, launching in the coming weeks, represents a calculated gamble.

The company promises that ads will not influence ChatGPT's answers and conversations will remain private from advertisers. Whether users believe this as ad revenue pressures mount remains to be seen.

For investors, the message is clear… AI companies are transitioning from growth at all costs to sustainable monetization.

The free ride is over.

As someone who has run paid ad campaigns across the web for the past decade, this will be a huge opportunity for businesses to put their product in front of the right people… at least until the ad blindness kicks in.

Prompt of the Day

Today, we use Nano Banana to help us pump out some infographics. These images do incredibly well on social media and are a consistent part of our daily facebook marketing. Nano Banana has made them as easy as a single prompt where it would take at least an hour to pump these out prior…

Here is the prompt I used. You could do even better splitting the research and the image creation… but I wanted to showcase how solid Nano Banana can be.

Prompt:

“Create this image, and do these steps…

1. Research and create an isometric infographic illustration titled “AI Tools That Actually Save Time” (Top 10) showing the top ai tools that in order of time saved with usage

Visual Style:
Create 20 adorable 3D clay-style miniature dioramas in a kawaii “blind box collectible” aesthetic. Each scene should feature:
• A unique isometric building representing the brand
• The brand’s mascot or iconic elements
• Tiny chibi-style customers and staff
• Clean borders with soft plastic textures and bright studio lighting

Layout Requirements:
• Arrange all dioramas in a flowing, connected layout on a warm cream/beige background
• Connect scenes with dotted lines to show ranking flow
• Label each with rank number, brand name, and exact location count in clear black text
• Add decorative red circular elements scattered throughout
• Include “Official reports” citation at bottom
• Use harmonious colors with a playful, educational infographic feel

Overall Composition: The final image should look like a professional, shareable social media infographic that’s both informative and visually delightful - perfect for viral engagement. Make it in 9x16 aspect ratio”

Thanks for joining us today! We have a lot of cool stuff coming for you guys from AI Automation Kits to some free training to some extra goodies.

Great to have you. Talk to you tomorrow.

MIDAS AI