It's only a matter of time before the LLMs start having paid product placement in their results. Even open-source - the money needed to train & operate these models is just too enormous.

Could there be a distributed training system run by contributors, like the various @Home projects? Yeah, decent chance of that working, especially with the widespread availability of fiber connections. But then to query the model you still need a large low-latency system (i.e. not distributed) to host it, and that's expensive.