Ads won't be slapped onto answers, my guess is that they will be subtly and silently inserted into them so that you don't even notice. It won't always be what you see either as companies, political groups, and others who seek to influence you will pay to have specific words/phrases omitted from answers as well.

AI at this point is little more than a toy that outright lies occasionally yet we're already seeing AI hurting people's ability to think, be creative, use critical thinking skills, and research independently.

Similarly, if costs double (or worse, increase to a point to be close to typical SaaS margins) and LLMs lose their shine I dont think there will be friction on the way out. People (especially executives) will offer up ChatGPT as a sacrifice.

It could indicate that many people find it more of an entertainment product than a tool, and those are often harder to monetize. You've got ads, and that's about it, and puts a probable cap on your monthly revenue per user that's less than most of the subscription prices these companies are trying to get (especially in non-USA countries).

(I find it way more of a tool and basically don't use it outside of work... but I see a LOT of AI pics and videos in discord and forums and such.)

It’s the prodigal child of tech.

When OpenAI sells a ChatGPT subscription, they incur large costs just to serve the product, shrinking margins.

Big difference in unit economics, hence the quantization push.

Rest of the market be damned -- combined with the poor customer mix (low to middle income countries) this explains why there has been such a push by the big labs to attempt to quantize models and save costs. You effectively have highly paid engineers/scientists running computationally expensive models on some of the most expensive hardware on the market to serve instructions on how to do things to people in low income countries.

This doesn't sound good, even for ad-supported business models.