Market competition with a high barrier to entry doesn’t tend to result in a wide range of options for consumers. Everyone spending huge sums on infrastructure will have very similar pressure to find advertising revenue since ordinary people aren’t tripping over themselves to take on substantial new subscriptions.

Markets usually only need to care about broad preferences. Sometimes they must care about noisy minorities, but those can often be ignored. I would love a privacy-focused smartphone with a keyboard that lets me use my banking apps and work apps and things. The market is never going to build this for me -- the number of people who like this are too few, and the costs of production are too high.

It's easy to imagine a few major LLM players all censoring or avoiding similar topics, or all equally captured by more or less the same advertisers.

Question is whether the space is competitive enough. Other SOTA models are made by companies whose business model already is selling ads.

You underestimate the power of brand recognition and the first mover advantage associated with it.