[sho_hn]

I predict users won't accept this and will have a choice in the matter due to a competitive landscape.

It lowers performance, and one artifact of a natural language interface is that it'll trip the red flags for salesmanship in the human brain and trigger revulsion and and anger in a way that an ad in a search results listing doesn't.

This is where marketers usually jump in with "if the user doesn't like it, it's just a bad ad - users will love useful ads, and targeting will make it work". I never buy this because simply there's too much contention for my wallet and the market wants to sell me things more often than I need to buy things, and ad companies like Google are so far pretty bad at refusing business.

I wouldn't be surprised if LLM search monetization is more likely to take a subscription form. If you told me that 2-3 years from now access to these systems is most commonly via the 365 subscription of your employer which it "graciously", as a standard benefit, also allows you to use at home, I would not be surprised.

Many variables here though. Cost of local inference over time being a massive one, copyright laws for training data another, etc.