There will I’m sure be the ability to pay and not have ads just like there is on streaming platforms, podcasts, etc.
Or should there be tax supported free AI?
These trends combined will mean that eventually it will seem old-fashioned to use a remotely-hosted model for anything other than the most demanding tasks. Just as we don't use mainframes for computation anymore outside of niche tasks like 3D render farms.
The only people using ad-supported AI will be people who can't afford a newer device with local inference. So it will be more or less like the web today, where ads are primarily targeted and viewed by less-affluent and less-technical users.
Of course, I can't see the future, but it would take a lot for those trend lines to not converge. The only thing that could delay the convergence is true AGI, but I'm currently not a believer.
If that happens, then I suspect we will see legislation that makes it illegal to use a model outside of those provided by approved vendors like OpenAI. The utility value of LLMs for influencing people as a propaganda and control tool is just too high for those in power to let this technology be democratized.
Look at the state of DRM for video streaming -- how much industry effort has been put into making sure consumers don't own their content? We will see an even bigger push with self-serve models.
The entire banking sector would like a word.
Instead of interacting with the cloud model directly, run a simple local model to interact with the cloud model and have it filter out all the ads before they reach you.
This is already what the chatbots do when it comes to interacting with rest of the Web, instead of you visiting websites yourself, they collect the information from the websites for you and present it in a format of your choice without the websites ads.
I don't see the ad model working out for chatbots in the long run given that those AI models already are the perfect ad filter.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see paid downloadable models in the future either.