AI will always be tied to concentrated capital due to the cost of training state of the art models.

So will CPUs, trains and new medicines. Some sectors simply need a huge amount of capital.

It’s unlikely that the market will open up any time soon so that you can get your LLM from someone who isn’t a fascist billionaire tech bro.

But this I think is not just likely, but inevitable. As long as at least one company puts out open-source AI models, users will have the option of switching to it. So even if they don’t switch, they can use this leverage to keep AI access sellers in check. Eventually, the whole market of selling access to AI will collapse, and the only AI trainers will be people who want to give it out for free (governments, universities) or companies who use it as a loss leader to sell an actual product.

As someone who lives in a third world country, no third world country gives a damn about what’s on your phone. The police only care if you make a scene in public (or publicly post something spicy) and somebody complains.

An NDA is just a contract, an actual law always trumps it.