It’s so hard to succeed without selling ads. There’s an exponential growth aspect to these endeavors and ads add a lot of revenue, which investors like, so those who don’t can find that the lost revenue “multiplies” due to lower outside investment, lower stock price growth, etc.

I wish the financial aspects were different, because Anthropic is absolutely correct about ads being antithetical to a good user experience.

Anthropic is very big (the biggest AI co?) in B2B, where you don't have ads. Also, if they end up creating a datacenter full of geniuses, ads won't make sense either.