They are already groveling to Nvidia for cash. It’s very likely the options are not “no ads” vs “ads”. The options for them are “no free tier” and “free tier with ads”.
Perhaps they'll use a lightweight advertising model to watch the output of chats, and look for product placement opportunities.
That's a "fun" thought experiment if they did do that, because the advertising model inference will need to run cheaply enough compared to the conversion rate/margin on clicks. I suspect it will be really hard to beat Google Ads on cost if you have to run inference on all chat output for each ad placement. It could put ChatGPT into a higher end/higher cost advertising platform.
