At the moment this feels like a x10 speed run on the browser wars: lots of competitors very quickly churning who is "best" according to some metric, stuff getting baked into operating systems, freely licensed models.
How do you make money off a web browser, to justify the development costs? And what does that look like in an LLM?
LLMs are a more flexible platform than browsers. They can be prompted, finetuned or run locally. Even if a company wants to make their base model spit ads, it won't fly.
Depends how subtle they are about it, and what the rest of the ecosystem looks like.
Perhaps the ad/ad-blocker analogy would be: You can have the free genuinely open source LLM trained only on Wikipedia and out-of-copyright materials, or you can have one trained on current NYT articles and Elsevier publications that also subtly pushes you towards specific brand names or political parties that paid to sponsor the model.
Also consider SEO: every business wants to do that, nobody wants to use a search engine where the SEO teams won. We're already seeing people try to do SEO-type things to LLMs.
If (when) the advertisers "win" and some model is spitting out "Buy Acme TNT, for all your roadrunner-hunting needs! Special discount for coyotes!" on every other line, then I'd agree with you, it won't fly, people will switch. But it doesn't need to start quite so bold, the first steps on this path are already being attempted by marketers attempting to induce LLMs crawling their content to say more good things about their own stuff. I hope they fail, but I expect them to keep trying until they succeed.
Google and Facebook grew organically for a number of years before really opening the tap on ad intrusions in to the UX. Once they did, a tsunami of money crashed over both, quarterly.
The LLM companies will have this moment too.
(But your post makes me want to put a negative-prompt for Elsevier publications in to my Custom Instructions, just in case)
There is huge choice in open models. People won't adopt one with ads baked in, unlike Google and Facebook, because now there are more options. There are 100K LLM finetunes on HuggingFace.
I've got some of them on my experimentation laptop. They're only good enough to be interesting, not good in comparison to the private models, and the number of fine-tunes doesn't help with that. In particular I've had Microsoft's Phi 3.5 for less than a week and yet I've already had at least 4 cases of it spouting wild nonsense unrelated to the prompt — and I don't even mean that it was simply wrong, I mean the response started off with Chinese and then acted like it was the early GPT-3 "Ada" model doing autocomplete.
One of my machines also has a copy of Firefox on it. Not used that in ages, either. But Firefox is closer in quality to Chrome, than any of the locally-runnable LLMs I've tried are to the private/hosted LLMs like 4o.
How do you make money off a web browser, to justify the development costs? And what does that look like in an LLM?