"Lots of users would gladly pay way more than $30/year have an ad-free experience"? Outside of ads embedded in Google Maps, a free and simple install of Ublock Origin essentially eliminates ads in Search, YouTube, etc. I'd expect that just like Facebook, people would be very unwilling to pay for Google to eliminate ads, since right now they aren't even willing to add a browser extension.
It worked for YouTube, I don’t see why the assumption of paid gpt models will follow google and not YouTube, particularly when users are conditioned to pay for gpt already.
