I don't see ads as a big problem with ChatGPT. You could put a side-bar on the right and on the fly recommend products relevant to the on-going conversation.
The cost of computing these ads would be a lot more than today's keyword-based approach, that's certainly a problem. But think of hyper-relevant ads, based on the chat itself. There's a lot of information there, that beats tracking people's behavior online all day.
That depends on ad publishers, right? If they want to sell A, B and C and I am interested in D, then Google's still showing one of A, B or C to me. D doesn't make profit if there is nobody paying for ads.
Google is advertising things we don't need, that's why ad clicks are so abysmal. LLMs won't change that.
I’ve been infuriated with DuckDuckGo on occasion because it refused to exclude certain results.
In fact when you add an exclusion clause it simply boosts those results further instead of removing them.
I’ve been told this is because the underlying search providers refuse to exclude paying customer even when you explicitly don’t want to hear from them.
I could definitely see this happening in LLM answers too and I don’t expect it to be particularly subtle.
The cost of computing these ads would be a lot more than today's keyword-based approach, that's certainly a problem. But think of hyper-relevant ads, based on the chat itself. There's a lot of information there, that beats tracking people's behavior online all day.