Self-hosted is a great way to go for those who can afford the initial cost and can get the setup done. I’d love to see more of it but I also know that most people won’t do that, and I get it because if I asked my mom to self-host right now I think her brain would explode.

Second best we can do is start using and promoting alternatives. Us nerds tend to be some of the earlier adopters. If enough users flock to the right platform, and if the platform is easy for non-nerds to sign up, then the shift may happen. Now is a climate where the desire for change is higher than normal.

No company is too big to dominate the landscape, the momentum and desire just needs to grow. And we should be careful of jumping from one pirate ship to another pirate ship. TikTok to Reels, Twitter/X to Threads, these are not the kind of changes we need to encourage.

But I’m not one for social media overall, so I can’t do much except inform my family and friends in a way that doesn’t drive them crazy. To anyone reading: don’t be that guy either, because if you pester too hard you’re likely to breed resentment and cause people to become further entrenched in their current habits.

When it comes to LLM AI usage, there’s definitely a few things you can consider.

I’ll reference OpenAI as you mentioned but it can apply to others as well to varying degrees

First is that the OpenAI has the goal of making a profit, but the market is getting more saturated, the costs to run data centres increases with model complexity and user base increases.

Funding is being pumped into them by investors, government in the US and other non-AI companies are banking on AI to bolster the economy and profits respectively. For things like ChatGPT they offer paid plans for consumers but this is a small fraction of their revenue.

The stats show they are losing money quickly. Investors want profits, the company wants dominance, the government seems to be approaching it from a “too big to fail approach”.

So we’re slowly seeing shifts; in the US, ads are being experimented with in ChatGPT, models are being chosen that use less tokens and less computing power, etc.

There have also been studies showing the diminishing returns of the thinking that “a bigger model is better”.

There’s also the question of how much they care about correct answers. They are surely aware that most don’t understand how an LLM AI works, that most will not do much research to fact-check answers, that most will consider convenience to be king.

Their token system is a huge balancing act and I’m not fully convinced they know what works and what doesn’t.

AI is being propped up, it shows signs of a bubble. Not to say AI is going anywhere, but when the pop inevitably happens, the LLM AI landscape will leave behind a lot of failure and monetary loss, and a few winners. Think dot com bubble for reference but in a whole new era of computing.

The circular economy going on and the investment from private and US government entities can only keep this train on the tracks for so long.

If I were to subjectively answer your question in a phrase: I don’t think they really do care too much at the moment.

Or make an EU app store that can verify certain apps (such as banking) so we can ditch google

I would much rather European companies ported their applications and services to a non-Google/non-ASOP platform. Having native e-government and applications would be a solid addition to make something like Sailfish OS more usable.

This is one area where European and Asian countries are way ahead of the US, things like e-govermernt (parts of Europe), simple and no/very low fee mobile payment systems (parts of Europe, India's UPI system).

Yep! Let me find my hat