Ofcourse. Costs and bugs multiply with time for such unpredictable systems.

And they cant rely on Advertising the way Google and Facebook did. Those guys too had no idea what they were getting into/building back in the day but advertising saved their ass(when things got unpredictable and chaotic) and they morphed drastically into ad tech firms. Thats not going to happen with OpenAI cause Ad tech is established market ie it would be like jumping into the oil or banking or telco industry and trying to eat market share of Exxon or AT&T or Bank of America. Never going to happen. More like it gets swallowed up into a division of Microsoft.

I think we will see ads and a more limited service before we see them completely remove the free version.

At least I hope so, because I can't say I get much value from it. I use ChatGPT once or twice a week, and I'm definitely not paying for it.

Currently nobody has a monetizing solution other than ads next to the chat. I think OpenAI will come up with a service that puts ads right into the chat. Head of Ads at Microsoft/Bing already said they're looking at options. Then it would remain free. And with "enshittification" in mind a pro version will eventually include ads, too.

No. Because there are already ChatGPT integrations into even DuckDuckGo which you can chat with.

That suggests there will be ChatGPT available for free permanantly.