> I don't think ads will be built into the main replies,
> because people will quickly lose trust in the results.
So, can they? yes. Will they? yes.
This is honestly why I struggle to get excited for anything in our industry anymore. Whatever it is it just becomes yet another fucking vector for ad people to shove yet more disposable shit in front of me and jingle it like car keys to see if I'll pull out a credit card.
The exception being the Steam Deck, though one could argue it's just a massive loss-leader for Steam itself and thus game sales (though I don't think that would hold up to scrutiny, it's pretty costly and it's not like Valve was hurting for business but anyway) but yeah. LLMs will absolutely do the exact same, and Google's now fully given up on making search even decent, replacing it with shit AI nobody asked for that will do product placements any day now, I would bet a LOT of money on it.
It's big, but it's honestly not that big. Most importantly, costs will quickly come down as we realize the limits of the models, the algorithms are optimized and even more-dedicated hardware is built. There's no reason to think it isn't sustainable, it will add up just fine.
But yes, it will attract a ton of advertising, the same curve every service goes through, like Google Search, YouTube, Amazon, etc. Still, just like Google and Amazon (subtly) label sponsored results, I expect LLM's to do the same. I don't think ads will be built into the main replies, because people will quickly lose trust in the results. Rather they'll be fed into a separate prompt that runs alongside the main text, or interrupts it, the way ads currently do, and with little labels indicating paid content. But the ads will likely be LLM-generated.