While totally unaware of the underlying economics, I do find it interesting how the major LLM providers found a way to get a non-trivial portion of consumers to actually pay for the consumer service. Of course, ads are still coming, but it was objectively impressive to go from 20+ years of "search is free" to "search is free, but capped, unless you pay us."

LLM use is not a simple search. I pay for it to either aid me or autonomously do work with document authoring, software development, and market research. It's not apples-to-apples when comparing.

if you looked at the underlying = economics - even a quick review - you'd see that paying customers is a relatively trivial portion. This is much closer to the dotcom race to maximum eyeballs; figure out the money part later.