Use local OSS models then? They aren’t as good and you need beefy hardware (either Apple silicon or nvidia GPUs). But they are totally workable, and you avoid your dislikes directly.

"Not as good and costs a lot in hardware" still sounds like I'm at a disadvantage.

$3000 is not that much for hardware (like a refurbished MBP Max with decent amount of RAM), and you'd be surprised how much more useful a thing that is slightly worse than the expensive thing is when you don't have anxiety about token usage.

$3000 might not be much to a wealthy software engineer in the US, but to, say, a college student in Portugal, it's a big expense.

Open source software democratized software in a huge way.

Ok, from that perspective we are still a few years from when a college student in Portugal can run local OSS models on their own hardware...but we aren't a few decades away from that, at least.

> they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.

is there anything you use that isn't? like laptop on which you work, software that you use to browse the internet, read the email... I've heard similar comment like yours before and I am not sure I understand it given everything else - why does this matter for LLMs and not the phone you use etc etc?

I’ve used FreeBSD since I was 15 years old - Linux before that.

My computer was never controlled by any corporation, until now.

Yeah I've always run Linux on my computers for the past 30 years. I'm pretty used to being in control.

what phone do you use?

A desktop/laptop is fundamentally different from a phone.

except of course they are controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use

Yes, but they are fundamentally different use cases.