absolutely not the case. there isn’t a single nerve in human brains that goes “oh imma tolerate ads cause this shit’s free but if I pay a few bucks no way” - if the product you use has utility to you, you will tolerate ads provided no other acceptable alternative. not to tell you something you don’t already know but anthropic is getting ads, eventually, it is a given. so while today you may have an alternative (arguably better even if no ads in the equation) at some point you won’t have an alternative (other than running local) and you’ll tolerate ads. the thing with LLM ads is that companies can make $$$$ from “ads” you don’t see, i.e. I can (not now but in the future) companies to push my product, e.g. claude is setting up architecture and proposes upstash (which I own and am paying anthropic a lot of money) instead of any competitor. or even more silently adding dependencies on my NPM library which has free and commercial offering…

Yeah sure, but for me the common man OpenAI doesn't add any value that Claude, Gemini or Meta AI doesn't also provide.

If they want to out-ad those companies to the tune of billions, I'll go with the least annoying. OpenAI hasn't earned any loyalty.

to me and you sure, but what do you reckon how many of their MAU are just people for whom “AI” is ChaptGPT? 90+%?

Anthropic is already an ad - for Anthropic. The uniquely "friendly" personality of their user-facing AI chatbot is far from accidental.

hm not sure I follow - the anthropic is selling itself to users that are already using it by being friendly to the users?