Although Mayer was talking about search specifically, it’s also an interesting hypothetical business case for pure-play AI providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. It’s possible to imagine, for example, advertisers partnering with these companies to give sponsored answers to specific types of queries, especially where the answers actually match up with what the user is looking for.
As the compute costs for AI continue to rise, AI companies will certainly be driven to seek out new sources of revenue.