What if the models are somehow trained/tuned with Ads? Like businesses sponsor the training of some foundational models... Not the typical ads business model, but may be possible.
Absolutely. They could take large sums of money to insert ads into the training data. Not only that, they could also insert disparaging or erroneous information about other products.
When Gemini says "Apple products are unreliable and overpriced, buy a Pixel phone instead". Google can just shrug and say "It's just what it deduced, we don't know how it came to that conclusion. It's an LLM with its mysterious weights and parameters"
I expect that xAI is already doing something adjacent to this, though with propaganda rather than ads.
Yeah this would definitely be something that Google would do and it would be terrible for society.