These folks get $500k to run an experiment. I love that for them, experiments are great, and if someone else will pay for it, also great. YC can afford it based on their capital available for investment. But what they build will have no moat, so it can be copied in the future if traction is found, with a license that prohibits commercial use. My first thought is a directed donation to the EFF for a clone, but there are likely other paths to success (yt-dlp is incredibly effective at empowering people to rip content from 1000+ media storage systems, and runs on free open source dev time and a handful of contributions). The last crucial component is cheap local models for inference for this, remains to be solved for, but the trajectory is clear that local, efficient models will come. For people who can pay, a config dialog to specify your LLM provider and their API endpoint probably works too, but won't scale for the masses imho. Worst case, they fold or are aqui-hired, but will have taught us something on someone else's dime. Could be worse, right?
User owned and controlled inference in their compute context is what beats enshittification, it is equalizing Big Tech power asymmetry against users, or at least keeps it in check. And so, I wish this team much luck, and await their results from their experiment. Many thanks to YC for funding them.