Google is winning on every AI front

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. The whole time that I was at OpenAI until now GOOG has been the only individual stock that I've been holding. Despite the threat to their search business I think they'll bounce back because they have a lot of cards to play. OpenAI is an annoyance for Google, because they are willing to burn money to get users. Google can't as easily burn money, since they already have billions of users, but also they are a public company and have to answer to investors. But I doubt if OpenAI investors would sign up to give more money to be burned in a year. Google just needs to ease off on the red tape and make their innovations available to users as fast as they can. (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)

> I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.

I also think adtech corrupting AI as well is inevitable, but I dread for that future. Chatbots are much more personal than websites, and users are expected to give them deeply personal data. Their output containing ads would be far more effective at psychological manipulation than traditional ads are. It would also be far more profitable, so I'm sure that marketers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech masterminds are hard at work to make this a reality already.

The repercussions of this will be much greater than we can imagine. I would love to be wrong, so I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendations anyway, they want to control the way their ad appears and what ad copy is used.

There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons.

So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this.

Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.