Having worked in digital marketing for a period, I have become very allergic to ads. If I'm watching a movie and there's an obvious product placement, the quality of film takes a major hit for me. I've been using the free version of ChatGPT and have been considering subscribing, but if there's at any point an ad in the output (even if I'm paying and they start inserting ads in the free tier), I doubt I'd continue using it. There has to be a better way to monetize free users.

The way that this write up describes it, the "ads" would be well curated, expensive responses from top AI models with lots of reasoning. If this is the case then the responses would be far more valuable for the user than a free response from a GPT-4o type model could ever be. It sounds like a win-win

I talk to people all the time who say "I love Instagram ads, they always know what I need before I do." People don't hate ads, they hate bad ads. The best AI in the world laser focused on burning compute to get the user the most helpful information sounds like it could capture the same sentiment as Instagram, but taken even further.