I've spent 18 months building DigitalOman.ai, and it started from watching the AI industry sprint, full speed, in what I'm convinced is the wrong direction.
Look at how this is actually being funded. The boom runs on the same fuel as every bubble before it debt, circular financing, valuations betting on a perfect future. Companies are burning billions faster than projected, buying up nuclear plants, and now seriously pitching orbital data centres just to keep the servers powered. Your "$20 a month" is subsidised by investors who fully intend to raise the price the moment you can't live without it. And the cheapest product these companies sell isn't the AI it's you. Your data trains it. Your privacy pays for it.
Everyone treats "bigger, further away, more centralised" as the only path. I think the right path was always the opposite: smaller, closer, and yours.