Given how fast the Open Source models have been able to catch up their closed-source counterparts, I think at least on the model/software side this will be a non-issue. The hardware situation is a bit grimmer, especially with the recent RAM prices. Time will tell: if in 2–3 years time, we can get to a situation where a 512GB–1TB VRAM / unified memory + good fp8 rig is a few thousands and not tens of thousands of dollars, we'll probably be good.

This is my immediate concern as well. Sam said in an interview that he sees "intelligence" as a utility that companies like OpenAI would own and rent out.

This has already happened or happening quite fast with cloud. Where setting up own data center, or even few servers could be crime against humanity if it does not use whole Kubernetes/Devops/Observability stack.