Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the possibility that his company would ever have to stuff ads into its chatbots, painting it as a desperate move he called a “last resort for us as a business model.” As it turns out, the billionaire may have overestimated how much people were willing to shell out every month to access ChatGPT. Paid subscriber growth has slowed in key markets as OpenAI continues to burn billions of dollars every quarter, further stoking concerns over the company’s potential inability to turn things around before it’s too late. And as the competition at Anthropic and Google continued to make massive strides in their efforts to catch up, Altman declared an internal “code red,” announcing late last year that ChatGPT was getting ads after all. OpenAI’s competitors saw the reversal as a golden opportunity to strike. Anthropic released a series of Super Bowl ads this week that openly skewer Altman’s compromise on ads — without ever naming the company outright, cleverly — in …