@mttaggart @catsalad I think you are absolutely right. And the tech industry has been trying to do this for a *while* — I remember Sun’s slogan “the network is the computer” back when they were trying to make thin-clients the norm for the average person, accessing Java applications hosted on the web. The tech wasn’t there at the time to make it feasible… but it is now.

And it isn’t just the rent-seeking they’re after. The constant surveillance, censorship, and data collection is an authoritarian wet dream. Look for a lot of “we can’t have the general public have computers, because then they can use unsanctioned LLMs to do bad things with them” arguments in the near future, especially couched in “won’t someone think of the children” language.