I suspect that ad powered LLMs will also dramatically sacrifice quality- they are a cost center suddenly, no reason to run a model with 10s or 100s of billions of parameters when some 500m thing will provide a minimally plausible scaffold for ad delivery.
Like everything else, most people won't notice a difference and prioritize free over paid.
The thing is, ads don’t pay that much. Facebook’s ad revenue works out to about $50/user per year . I probably don’t like FB enough to pay $5/mo for it (and even if I did, all the people I interact with that make it useful wouldn’t) but something that’s a personal assistant? Easy.
Like everything else, most people won't notice a difference and prioritize free over paid.