HargaRumah: OpenAI Courts Advertising Bigwigs At Cannes Lions

Rabu, 24 Juni 2026

OpenAI Courts Advertising Bigwigs At Cannes Lions

Plus: Google DeepMind partners with buzzy movie studio A24.

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OpenAI executives pitched advertisers on placing their ads in ChatGPT this week. Getty

Welcome back to The Prompt,

OpenAI executives pitched advertisers on placing their ads in ChatGPT this week at the annual Cannes Lions conference, the world’s largest advertising event. The AI behemoth has 900 million weekly active users and about 20% of ChatGPT queries are directly related to “commercial intent,” OpenAI’s ad chief Dave Dugan said, the Financial Times reported.

The company is already reportedly projecting it’ll reach $100 billion in advertising revenue by 2030. It needs the cash: With mounting costs that far outweigh revenue as it races its rival Anthropic to IPO, OpenAI sees ads as not only a core part of its business model, but also a way to subsidize its free and cheaper products. OpenAI first rolled out ads in ChatGPT in February, initially charging companies based on views per ad. It’s since expanded to cost-per-click ads across different markets like retail, health and travel.

With plans to soon merge ChatGPT and Codex into one app, OpenAI executives also positioned Codex as a way to spin up apps that can create elaborate ad campaigns. While it’s early days for the company’s ads business, it’s crucial that OpenAI woos advertisers with its pitch, especially as it transitions from a place where people look for information to a productivity tool where professionals can get work done.

Now let’s get into the headlines.

Rashi Shrivastava Staff Writer

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Big Plays

Google DeepMind is teaming up with independent movie studio A24 to conduct research and develop AI tools for film production, the companies announced. The search giant is also investing $75 million into A24, the $3.5 billion-valued indie studio behind Oscar-winning films like Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Whale, The Wall Street Journal reported. While Hollywood initially shunned the use of AI software over fears of job displacement and copyright infringement, prominent film studios are beginning to embrace them.

Show Me The Money

Getty Images announced a deal with OpenAI where the stock image giant’s library of licensed content will show up within ChatGPT responses. Shares of the company soared a staggering 150% after the announcement on Monday. The deal, which comes years after Getty sued Stability AI over alleged copyright infringement, signals a shift in the content landscape as more companies chose to strike deals with the AI giant for authorized use of their IP instead of pursuing litigation.

AI Deal Of The Week

San Francisco-based startup Baseten, which helps companies build and run AI models by providing computing power, raised $1.5 billion in funding in a Series F round led by Altimeter Capital, Spark Capital and Conviction. The startup raised financing across two tranches, one at an $11 billion valuation and the other at $13 billion valuation. The cash injection comes as more companies build their AI applications on top of cheaper and equally capable open source models to reduce exorbitant AI bills.

Also notable: VC firm Menlo Ventures has raised $3 billion to invest in seed and Series A-stage AI startups. Through a new fund called Inflection IV, the early Anthropic backer also plans to provide growth-stage capital.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan Youtube

Deep Dive

AI Slop Is Transforming YouTube. Its CEO Wants To Keep It Human

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In a conference room at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno,California, CEO Neal Mohan chuckles. A week earlier, OpenAI had unceremoniously announced it was shutting down Sora, its popular app for creating AI-generated video clips. Once seen as a flagship product and the future of AI video — it attracted a $1 billion investment from Disney — the sudden shuttering had rippled through the AI industry like a bombshell. “Oh boy,” Mohan tells Forbes when asked about the shutdown. “Well, I was as surprised to hear about it as maybe you were.”

YouTube is the indisputable king of online video. With 2.7 billion users, it's also hooked into one of the biggest, most important AI companies in the world: Google. That makes Sora's shut down, from arch-rival OpenAI, something of a blessing for a business navigating the rapidly shifting AI landscape. One less rival — YouTube Shorts released its own version of Sora’s most viral feature in April, which lets users create digital avatars of themselves — but also a harbinger of how fraught it is to generate, host and share AI videos.

For more than a decade, YouTube has faced its fair share of scourges, like accusations of radicalizing users or harming their mental well-being. But AI is a radically different challenge. It has the power to transform the site completely, from how people make content to what they consume. Mohan doesn’t downplay it. “This is a profound paradigm shift, and the technology is going to dramatically change how things are done,” he says.

The AI explosion, first and foremost, means more content — and more money for YouTube’s $60 billion annual revenue business. AI is already supercharging what creators can make, bringing down production costs and unlocking new ideas and business prospects. How-to videos, a mainstay of YouTube, can now be generated with a few simple prompts. And AI is also revolutionizing how quickly and cheaply marketers make the ads that are the site’s economic engine. There are now an estimated 29 billion videos in total on the platform, according to a January report from the research firm Omdia, with accelerating growth driven by factors like AI-generated video and the popularity of Shorts.

Model Behavior

A number of gas station owners in California including Walmart, Speedway and Albertsons have been hit with lawsuits, alleging that they used an AI tool developed by analytics company Kalibrate to artificially inflate gas prices across thousands of gas stations, causing a surge across the state. Plaintiffs claim the AI tool requires gas companies handing over volumes and cost data to Kalibrate, which makes pricing decisions for them, allowing them to avoid competing with each other. The defendants have not filed responses in court. Walmart said it’s reviewing the complaint and will respond in court.

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