Comment by LeonardoTolstoy

I asked my brother a similar thing about most AI (as he is heavily invested in that area at the moment). People talk about LLMs potentially replacing search but, I guess the question is: are most people going to eventually pay for search, or are they going to end up monetizing LLMs in a similar way to how Google monetizes their "free" search currently (i.e. ads)?

I guess my point is: yes, I imagine the point will be to have something like "I would like to have a picture of George Washington please" and then when it generates it Google will also ask (like in their image search): want to also search that on Google? And enough pass through will generate revenue via their traditional advertising model. Presumably someone who is generating an image of George Washington is doing it for a reason and would like to know other stuff about George Washington.

Ads seem completely unavoidable to me. People like free (prefer it even, go figure) even if it is "free" (with ads), and businesses like ads because it turns out to be by far the most lucrative way to operate (just look at Netflix which is, apparently, actively trying to push people into the ad-tier service because they make much more money per user on the ad-tier than on their paid service).