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.