I really don't see how they're going to be google here. The free tier is dominated by verticle integration and the platform that people use. Long term I imagine google wins the bottom of the market and I'd be suprised if they lost.

Ads.

Ads work when you can server $.01 worth of ads to a user for $.0001 of server cost. I fail to see how you can make it work when doing LLM inference which is significantly costlier than web search.

In about 4 months, OpenAI’s fundraiser decks will leak, which will include their current ad revenue.

90+% of queries are probably so common/evergreen that, if a cheaper model made all the different language varients and ways of asking the question into one query, they could be cached quite effectively.

People tell these models everything. You don't think a pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize that?