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.
I hope local models remain viable. I don't think ever expanding the size is the way forward anyway.
When Gemini says "Apple products are unreliable and overpriced, buy a Pixel phone instead". Google can just shrug and say "It's just what it deduced, we don't know how it came to that conclusion. It's an LLM with its mysterious weights and parameters"