The answer was, and will be ads (talk about inevitability!)
Can you imagine how miserable interacting with ad-funded models will be? Not just because of the ads they spew, but also the penny-pinching on training and inference budgets, with an eye focused solely on profitability. That is what the the future holds: consolidations, little competition, and models that do the bare-minimum, trained and operated by profit-maximizing misers, and not the unlimited intelligence AGI dream they sell.