SITUATION EXPLAINED: OpenAI's ad business hit $1 billion annualized. • ChatGPT Ads reached a billion in annualized run rate after starting US testing earlier this year • From today, advertisers across India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa can buy directly through OpenAI's Ads Manager, and advertisers outside the US are a growing share • Ads run on the free tier and on ChatGPT Go, the $8 plan aimed at markets where $200 a month isn't viable • eMarketer's Nate Elliott called it incredibly impressive and terribly disappointing, since it leaves OpenAI well short of its $2.5 billion target for 2026 @theojaffee: "OpenAI now has a product with about a billion users, as many as Gemini and Meta AI. So in theory, if they do this right, they should be able to make a lot of money on advertising."

ALERT: 62-year-old man on the run after allegedly spray-painting a swastika on Gavin Newsom's face and skipping court. David Lawrence Smith Jr. was arrested by the Las Vegas Police Department in connection with an ongoing political campaign sign vandalism spree. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Counter Terrorism Section used automatic license plate readers to catch Smith, who allegedly spray-painted over 60 swastikas on Newsom’s ads. Smith was released from jail and failed to appear for his court hearing, prompting the judge to issue a warrant for his arrest.

🚨 NOW: LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt just dropped an absolute BANGER, drawn from the theme of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Pratt's ads are SO GOOD 🔥🔥 No wonder Karen Bass is terrified. He's surging. KEEP PUSHING, @spencerpratt 👏🏻

want to hear an interesting strategy story between meta and apple? 10 years ago i was at meta, and worked on a lot of product features that had to ship to iOS, and they all had to go through a painful apple review where anything could get cut apple back then developed a clear strategy where they used “privacy” as the angle to gain user trust and win against competition a clear example was the “ask app not to track” dialog which controls ads targeting - they made every 3p app go through that scary dialog which heavily implies to the user that they should obviously click “do not track” you might think they did so truly to protect user privacy - and if you did, that would be an example of their successful brainwashing marketing campaign you see, they made users click NO for every 3p app’s ads tracking, but when it comes to apple themselves? sorry - it’s default YES. most users don’t even know apple used their data for ads. if you don’t believe me, go to your iphone settings and search for “apple ads”. did you ever turn that on and agree to share all your data listed there? apple did this to make their ads targeting more accurate, and cripple facebook and google, in an effort to make advertisers move their business to apple. i still don’t understand how this was even legal but 10 years later, something funny happened.. you know why apple’s so behind on AI? at a time when everybody and their mom could build an agent, how could apple basically still have nothing to show? well.. that is because they locked themselves into this privacy narrative, so they wanted to make their AI run locally on the device, so they can say “look! our AI has better privacy”. with that constraint applied, they have no way to catch up with the frontier now with mac studio, it seems they are going even deeper into a local AI story. we’ll see how that plays out, but i’m not very bullish that fiddling local LLMs would go mainstream outside of the tech hobbyist community meanwhile, meta has invested in research, bought compute, acquired talent, created a reasonable model, and shipped AI products that are looking more and more promising every day in a world that’s changing so rapidly and approaching singularity, a long term strategy can become counterproductive the game’s still on, and i’d place my bets on companies that act fast and embrace change