OpenAI is running ads. Silicon Valley only knows one play.

In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page published a white paper called Advertising and Mixed Motives. In it, they warned that advertising-funded search engines would be inherently biased towards advertisers and away from consumers.

"Search engine bias is particularly insidious," they wrote.

They were right. And then they built Google anyway.

Now we're watching the same story unfold with AI.

The venture capital starts to runs out. The pressure to monetise kicks in. And suddenly the product that was supposed to help you starts serving someone else's interests.

These ads will work. They'll be effective. Budgets will shift from Google to OpenAI just as they shifted from TV to digital. Attention follows utility, and LLMs are becoming the new front door to the internet.

But here's what concerns me: we're monetising human attention to the nth degree, and now we're doing it inside tools people trust to think for them.

The wider question is this: how do brands get built when people just talk to LLMs?

If the answer is whoever pays for placements, we've learned nothing.

Other channels matter more than ever. Distinctiveness matters more than ever. Because in a world where AI mediates everything, brand — personal or business — might be the only differentiator left.

These tools should benefit us. Not just the advertisers buying space inside them.