I’m on Lowes website right now. Can you point out an ad? Because I don’t see any. And why do you think that companies can’t inject advertising into their LLMs? It’s easy to do and with a long enough customer relationship, it gets very powerful. It’s like a sales clerk who remembers everything you have ever bought and appears like it understands your timing.
As for data, I can name several major retailers who expose the stock/aisle number via a public api. That information is highly available and involved in big dollar tasks like inventory management.
When I go to the Lowe's website, the homepage itself is covered in ads. "Spring Into Deals", "Lowe's and Messi are assisting you with 100 points! Join Our Loyalty Program". "Get up to 35% off select major appliances"... the more I scroll, the more ads come up.
Companies can inject ads into their own LLMs, sure. But ChatGPT is somebody else's LLM.
Your point about retailers exposing stock/aisle number via a public API surprises me. What do you mean by public? What's the EULA look like? Exposing stock/aisle number via API for the purpose of inventory management is not a use case that would require making API access public.
As for data, I can name several major retailers who expose the stock/aisle number via a public api. That information is highly available and involved in big dollar tasks like inventory management.