Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.

OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.

I think they're saying it's inevitable for billion dollar capitalist companies. /not-s

And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s

It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.