I think the reason ads are so prolific now is because the pay-to-play model doesn't work well at such large scales... Ads seem to be there only way to make the kind of big money LLM investors will demand.

I don't think you're wrong re: their hope to hook people and get us all used to using LLMs for everything, but I suspect they'll just start selling ads like everyone else.

Big tech are bigger than ever, they've simply learned to double dip with pay to play and ads. AI is also going to do both, but I think they have stickiness to extract a lot more per month. Like once a generation grows up with AI crutch, they will shell out $$$ to not write their own emails, for the simple fact that they never really learned to write all their own shit in the first place.

Local models won't kill anything because they'll be obsolete as soon as these companies stop releasing them. They'll be forgotten within 6-12 months.