LLM inference takes up some scarce GPU time and many people are trying to use free entrypoints to build services instead of the intended paid APIs, so I understand why those services want to put limits on usage.

Programming playgrounds however are freely available for pretty much every mildly popular language, and these days many toolchains can even be compiled and run with JS or WASM so one could just serve some static files to host it. This is definitely more suspicious than what OpenAI and other ML companies are doing.

I can understand why openai requires phone number. With how much resources they spend on each prompt, they want to limit abuse of their systems. Also ChatGpt is not available in many countries and a phone number is reliable enough test of location. I am myself in one of these countries, but I also care about my privacy, so I use services that use chatGPT indirectly instead: https://you.com with disposable email and https://phind.com

Given the iris-cataloguing efforts of Altman's Worldcoin, and Microsoft's intrusive telemetry-surveillance, I would doubt that's the only reason.

I appreciate you offering an alternative that preserves a small measure of privacy.

That's why I don't use GPT.

There is no parallel. If meta required you to be logged in to run local inference with llama, that might be similar. Your using openai's cloud so you're logged in.