Yes for sure companies are already paying for having their products added to the training set of popular LLMs.

Source?

Meta is an advertising company.

Google is an advertising company.

Microsoft, in fits of jealousy and veiled rage, wishes it were an advertising company.

OpenAI is not profitable yet despite having high charge rates.

If they aren't capitalizing on ad infusion yet, their shareholders should rightfully be getting angry, right? Money left on the table.

Simply because you and I may not be able to buy ads does not mean they arent already there.

Dont forget the pg classic on the topic: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Yes it's obvious this has to happen. AIs tend to promote certain products a lot more than others. If a training set costs billions to process, the incentive to sneak your product into the set... Maybe give it a few additional training rounds of that... It's like an ad which keeps coming back over and over for the life of the model whenever someone asks a related question.

>>for sure companies are already paying for having their products added to the training set of popular LLMs.<<

Is there a source for such claims. I am also interested to know.

That’s not a source, that’s speculation