People watching tons of ads on streaming services to save a few dollars a month is proof enough that ads aren't going to deter your average person.

> The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google.

Where is this revisionist history coming from? The introduction of ads to Google was not seen as "crazy", in fact it was basically seen as inevitable. And when Google did introduce ads, they were generally praised because ads were highlighted and clearly separated in a different color (yellow) at the top and right rail. Of course, that slowly eroded until ads were nearly indistinguishable from organic results and took up the entire first page, but when they launched I don't remember anyone being surprised that Google added ads.

I think Google as a search engine, back when the started with ads, was really superior to others. (To the point where competitors just didn't find what I was searching for and Google had it in the top three or at least on the first page.) As for ChatGPT's advantage... I am currently subscribed there and not for others... but at least for the software engineering models, OpenAI doesn't seem so far ahead... maybe it's true for other models as well. Also it's likely that most income for the LLM provider companies will come from third parties or business that integrate APIs. And as long as all the APIs are so similar (and wrapper libraries make them compatible for many use-cases)... nobody has a moat.

This will become even more interesting once business start using the cheapest for each use-case... which often end up being some open and license free model. I imagine this could be a big part of "enterprise workflow automation". Thinking of many office jobs which don't require actual intelligence besides understanding language...

Many of the investors in ChatGPT are likely old enough to remember when Google didn’t have ads.

>Does anyway even remember when Google used to not have ads?

Which is why I have adblock now.

I just got my first advert in the chat, it launched a shopping research unrelated to what I was talking about.

Really?! Startpage, DDG, Brave, Ublock, NextDNS, Proton, Mulvad, and all those similar companies and OSS exist literally because people were infuriated at the Big Tech bait-and-switch tactics.