I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused way, without trying to sell me anything or generate SEO rankings or register ad impressions. It just helped me. And that was incredibly refreshing in a digital world that generally feels adversarial.

Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here.

I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly, or the open source models get good enough, we could still enjoy that simplicity and focus for quite a while. Here’s hoping!