I'm right there with you...but may I offer an alternative narrative in two parts and then address the pipeline issue you raise. The first part: There's a small (but real) subset of people turning their back on big corpo. Retro-tech, dumb-phones, self hosting, linux, right-to-repair advocates, OSS and FOSS, privacy groups .... everyone can smell the enshittification and are (in their own ways) pushing back. That's not nothing. I think the way forward is not to play the game. Big corpo will do what big corpo always does. But we can use the tools we have to make the things we want. Will it compete with SOTA? No. But...does it need to? At an individual level, I'd argue "probably not". It just needs to work for the individual. More to the point, there's something to be said about doing more with less. Constraints can bring about real innovation. If the answer cannot be "Throw more X at it" (where X is $$$, compute, whatever)...then how can you leverage the tools and intelligence you have to build what you want? I think that's the real question. Now for the second part: >So for me the big question is, what’s our call on a possible (likely even?) future where we are forever stuck using cloud provided AI along with all of its negatives, in the same way > that basically all of us has been and still is stuck using MS windows, Google and the big-social-media hellscape? I'm more sanguine about it because I think this is down to the individual. Look at where you are now - it's not Reddit or Facebook :). You and I choose to be here because...reasons. We can choose to run Linux, LibreOffice, Mullivad, llama.cpp, SearXNG, Syncthing, Immich etc for the same reasons. I think the trick will be figuring out how to navigate from your home ecosystem into the wider world, without getting f'd in the a. The one thing I don't have a clean answer for is your pipeline point. If the content web collapses into AI slop - and it's already going that way - then the human-generated signal that makes these models worth using starts to degrade. You may need to hold onto your "Good Old LLMs" for a while yet (or start training your own from scratch. There are ways and means but that's beyond the scope of this conversation I think). In any case, individual sovereignty doesn't fix *that*. You can opt out personally and still live in a world where the epistemic commons has been strip-mined. That...probably what WILL happen, come to think of it. Ok, fine. But partial answers already exist - cryptographic provenance of human content, federated communities being structurally harder to slop-flood (maybe). Honestly? Nobody has solved that problem just yet. The people building the biggest models know it's a problem and don't have a clean answer either. Anyone who says they do is selling something. All I can say is the only way to win is not to play the game. Which WORP would no doubt meep-morp at.