Wtf. Are we actually seeing a push towards being 100percent dependent on the cloud?

Sovereign AI has never been more important.

Controlling AI is so much more powerful and impactful than controlling search or social algorithms.

Centralized AI a 10x on social control over everything we have seen before, and there is no way that a free and open society survives contact with centralised, high capability AI if the system is manipulated towards guiding outcomes. It’s essentially mind control, as people will offload an even greater share of their cognition to AI than they do with search and social.

Build and maintain sovereign AI while you still can.

No, we are just seeing a push towards Nvidia wanting to make money.

Nothing stops you from giving Nvidia half a million for their latest and greatest AI GPUs, unless you are in China I guess, but China does very well despite the export control.

It is just classic market segmentation, the thing Nvidia and just about every company that can benefit from it has done for decades. Cloud providers are ready to pay a lot of money, consumers wanting local AI have a lower budget, and gamers even lower. But a low budget is greater than zero, and there is still money to be made on these markets. But they also don't want to compete against themselves, so they are going to find ways of crippling enterprise-class workloads on consumer hardware.

It used to be that they crippled high precision arithmetic on consumer hardware, because it was a differentiating factor, but AI doesn't care about high precision, so now, it is something else.

NVIDIA probably already figured out that local will be massive part and are preparing to do DRM for AI.

Pay up for license to unlock full capacity, pay up for license to use encrypted models from AI moguls, paid per billion tokens processed or just operations in GPU

Yes, we are, the amount of data centers being built doesn't make sense for long-term model improvements. They are definitely planning on licensing us terminals to use instead of our own PCs at the very least as a backup plan if the frontier companies fail and have assets liquidated.

Years ago I would think I was being paranoid to think they would patch hardware retroactively to make it slower so you need to pay more to use your own hardware. In 2026, I think this is what all car companies are doing after you pay the full car price. I don't see a reason why they wouldn't do it with so little competition

The reason why open source couldn't win search and social was because they need network effects which is not possible for open source maintainers.

AI is a software just like operating systems and executables where open source absolutely dominates the industry. Remember when the compiler engineers optimized the shit out of llama.cpp.

Right now the bottleneck for AI software is compute and data. Moore's law is give us compute, StackOverflow, arXiv (and it's children like bioRxiv), gutenberg and others (3lib, anna, internet.org) will give us data.

It's a waiting game. Open source always wins.

no nvidia wants you buying hardware to run local. the issue here is that the RTX spark was designed for windows.

> Are we actually seeing a push towards being 100percent dependent on the cloud?

[Hanlon's Razor] This is such a contrived performance drop scenario that I find it hard to believe it was done with the purpose you're inferring.

I'd interpret this as Nvidia not caring that much about Linux desktops/laptops once again (as opposed to Windows desktops/laptops), rather than anything to do with local vs cloud.

Remember this is the same company that stopped GTX/RTX users from hardware encoding more than 2 video streams at the same time

Yes? How is this at all surprising given....everything we've seen tech companies push for for years and years? People are fully embedding themselves and their workflows in the services of big, closed companies, and are going to be surprised when they finally feel able to clamp down? There has been warning sign after warning sign, but people are only increasing their dependence.

> Build and maintain sovereign AI while you still can.

As in, make your own inference and training hardware?

Yes, in everything.

I stopped using my laptop for dev and switched to talking to claude code on my phone and as you can imagine I am faster at producing code.

100% cloud with a single entry point device to manage dedicated servers + agents

This is classical move from Nvidia. They are doing similiar bullshits on their GPUs for decades. I'm very much looking forwars for their competition to rise.

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