I've seen multiple prior conversations about the idea on this site. It's easy to find similar reddit discussions with a search: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ljv78j/sam_altman_...

It's a fairly obvious way for them to make money, as people are using it as a replacement for search engines, and that's how search engines have made money.

Who? Those of us who were paying attention to how tech companies have operated for the past 25 years.

They start out subsidized by investors and then once they have enough users and can no longer pay for them with the invested cash, they push more and more ads onto users.

And it was easy to see that LLMs are an especially devious place the inject ads because they can flow right into the the response and not even look like an ad, but rather feel like a casual recommendation.

Many, many people expected this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42008569#42008733

Erm their recent hire of Simo and acquisition of Statsig made this obvious.

It’s all Ben Thompson has talked about for the past couple years.

It is literally a highway at this point for any B2C tech product. All the info they are collecting surely can be used for very targeted ads. Not hard to predict at all.