i like that people are taking the privacy argument seriously, after however many decades. i think there are other arguments to be made for running these locally which are less settled, but IMO the Fable debacle drives it home: the surest way to embrace this technology without worry that it will be taken away from you down the road is to physically own the compute.

if you need to ensure that, then just back up the model and buy hardware if the need arises

that's somewhere between saying "use Android, just switch to Graphene if/when they lock it down", and saying "just switch to postmarketOS/Ubuntu Touch/whatever flavor of Linux takes off".

i've watched friends try that route; i've been through this before. taking a downgrade is never fun: if it's a thing you're likely to care about in the future, then sometimes it's better to place yourself in the right ecosystem early.

I just don't see how with the whole open weight system this situation would happen or that it'd be likely enough to warrant this

in terms of privacy, yes that's a real application, but someone taking it all away? I don't see it happening.

it's not an OS or a device, it's just a box/thing that runs a model, it's really commodity stuff we're talking about

more realistic concern would be that the open labs wouldn't be able to compete in the future thus development ends, but that means you can't host models that don't come out so...

again maybe I misunderstood but I just don't see why this would be worth it just for that one concern