The "good" thing is this is all way too expensive to be ad-supported. Maybe there will be some ad-supported products using very small/cheap models, but the leading edge stuff is always going to be at the leading-edge of compute usage too, and someone has to pay the bill. Even with investors subsidizing a lot of the costs, it's still very expensive to use the best models heavily for real work.
Subscription services can sell ads too. See Hulu, or Netflix. Spotify might not play "radio ads" if you pay, but it will still advertise artists on your home screen.
These models being expensive leads me to think they will look at all methods of monetization possible when seeking profitability. Rather than ads being off the table, it could feasibly make ads be on the table sooner.
Maybe it could happen, but the revenue that can be made per user from ads is basically insignificant compared to the compute costs. They’d be pissing off their users for a very marginal benefit.
It is guaranteed that the models will become salespeople in disguise with time. This is just how the world works. Hopefully competition can stave it off but I doubt it.
It's also why totalitarian regimes love it, they can simply train it to regurgitate a modified version of reality.
There's no such thing as too expensive to be ad-supported. There might be too expensive to be ONLY ad-supported, but as a revenue stream ads can be layered on top of other sources. For example, see that the ads shown on a $100/mo cable package!
