The foundation model companies are screwed. Only shovel makers (Nvidia, infra companies) and product companies are going to win.
Any kind of media with zero or near zero copying/distribution costs becomes a deflationary race to the bottom. Someone will eventually release something that's free, and at that point nothing can compete with free unless it's some kind of very specialized offering. Then you run into a the problem the OP described: how do you fund free? Answer: ads. Now the customer is the advertiser, not the user/consumer, which is why most media converges on trash.
Perplexity released the deepseek r1 1331? ( I am not sure I forgot) It basically removes chinese censorships / yes you can ask it about the tiananmen square.
I think the next iteration of these ai model ads would be sneaky which might be hard to remove
Though it's funny you comment about chinese censorship yet american censorship is fine lol
I say this because I think that the Perplexity model is tuned on additional information, whereas the alliterated models only include information trained into the underlying model, which is interesting to see.