At @ionet we did not just sit around theorizing about open intelligence. I watched the bottleneck up close when we launched IO Intelligence in Feb 2025. Brilliant teams with real ideas kept getting stuck behind waitlists, quotas, and prices that quietly decide who even gets to test the frontier tech. I kept thinking about what happened with AWS and Azure. They locked startups early, and for years these firms either rented compute on their terms (price, tenure, KYB etc.) or few attempted to stand up their own data center nodes. Innovation still happened. It just happened inside someone else’s garden. You could build, but only on their inventory, their timeline, and their bill. Open weights models without usable and affordable compute is still a gated system. That is the part that stays with me. At @ionet we built a marketplace so idle GPUs could become clusters people could actually launch. We built our own inference stack to allow users to access multiple open source models at industry grade TTFS with zero data retention. Not another dashboard. Not another permission slip. It is the same story with the recent AI safety calls by leading frontier labs. Whenever the essential layer concentrates, progress does not disappear. It just becomes something a few companies get to ration. Defense before restriction only works if the people doing the defending can afford to run the work.