If you don't think AI will include sponsors/ads/etc once someone comes out on top, well, I might have a bridge to sell you.

Seriously though, I'm not sure why Google evolving in this manner precludes them from having a profitable business model. Right now we're subsidizing the costs (probably just a bit) and having ongoing subscription revenue they can increase as needed (particularly in the "google won the race" scenario) will be key before they even have to consider layering advertising on top.

I think the difference this time is, anybody can curate a baseline set of training data, there is no need to constantly be scanning the open web and indexing it. Everyone already has "good enough" question-answering capability. There is no option to pay or an ad-free, trackerless search funciton on google, but I can do that with multiple non-google providers. Between LLM and kagi I've managed to largely cut google out of my life for $40/mo. Subsidized LLM will eventually disappear, but I think cost per token will reduce over time to meet the ~$20/mo ad-free tier.