I suppose the hope is that they don’t, and we wind up with commodity frontier models from multiple providers at market rates.

I don't care about OpenAI even if they don't serve ads.

I can't trust any of their output until they become honest enough to change their name to CloseAI.

by having datacenters with GPUs and API everyone uses.

So they are either earning money directly or on the API calls.

Now, competition can come and compete on that, but they will probably still be the first choice for foreseeable future

Google served ads for decades and no one ever jumped ship to another search engine.

The same way people stayed on Google despite DuckDuckGo existing.