Accidental win for individual freedom! 1. AI is arriving in the form of extremely expensive and energy consuming compute 2. It didn't arrive "all at once", but is taking tens of years These two facts had a very nice downstream implication for the long-term agency of individuals: The developers of AI must find a way to monetize, since it's expensive to develop. And since primitive AI (let's say 2018-2024) wasn't smart enough to do much valuable work itself, they had to monetize by providing DIRECT access to individuals. Now AI is starting to be economically valuable, but the frame, culture, and expectations have already been set; direct access to AI by individuals is just how the world works. (btw, pay attention if this starts to change). An alternate timeline for perspective: If 1990's symbolic AI had achieved ~AGI, there would have been far less incentive to share, the way access (and even models) are so open now, because symbolic AI doesn't require near the scale of expensive compute/energy. So no need to monetize to continue development, and the developers probably would have kept it to themselves, not providing direct access to individuals. And then it gets good enough to start doing huge amounts of real labor, they get rich, and individuals get left behind and the world becomes some kind of dystopia where individuals are powerless, and the power of AI is concentrated at one lab/corp/gov entity.