Yeah but the problem then becomes you are in a knife fight with google. Welcome to margin compression on already thin margins and high capex. Its not a like they buy commodity hardware that is cheap, or have the depth of talent like Google to do ASICs + DC management.

Once OpenAI turns to ads, I think it's an indicator they are out of ideas.

You could have said this about Meta 15 years ago, and now they're a ~$2 trillion dollar company!

Meta (FB, IG, WA) and Google Search arent really comparable... OAI and Google def are though.

Google has a monopoly on search (maybe not as seen by courts, but certainly practically). OpenAI is in a commodity brawl with dozens of companies. Still, if anything saves their ass it's that "chatgpt" is synonymous with "chatbot".

Yes, but only if the users can't move to competition. Just look at YouTube, there were relatively few ads until all other video sites were dead.