I am going to offer an unpopular opinion. This is not a bad thing.

Even now there are viable options for a person to pick up a dedicated ( and reasonably powerful ) local inference machine, where time from setup to working is than few hours ( more if you don't want to use Windows.. which is fair ).

Separately, about the chat sessions. For once, those ads could be more relevant than repeat toaster ads immediately after me buying a toaster. But if one is worried about profiling ( and advertising ), one should not using a commercial solution anyway. Personally, I am taking a.. calculated risk.

There is a concern that openai will follow the same path as google, but they can't ( at least for now ) really afford to make chatgpt not useful as this is their only viable product.

I will end with a more optimistic note. This is HN. There are people here, who are likely working on something that does not depend on openai or any of the big providers anyway. It is going to be ok. And if it won't be. Make it so. After all, this is supposed to be your realm. Own it.