I personally don't trust Snowden. Looking at the difference between how he was treated and how Assange was treated. One guy gets to rot in prison, other guy gets movies made about him from Hollywood. Snowden is very much controlled opposition in my mind.
But that being said, I think he is truthful about OpenAI. Which sucks, because now I and many others love using chat gpt.
It's possible to self host these things though. I read an article about it here:
Depends on the model. Dolphin-mistral is like 4GB in size and runs on any somewhat modern cpu with reasonable performance. Larger models ofc should be run with higher end gpus at least, but even in hybrid mode (gpu+cpu) models like dolphin-mixtral (26GB) run just fine. For reference, I have a 5800x and a 6900xt, ollama installed in a distrobox container.
I think it's more complex than that. There's a reason he went to Russia, and it's not because Russia is a haven for political dissidents. He's a thorn in the US' side, and he's currently benefiting Russia by doing that, so he gets to stay. He probably also sold some intel to Russia as well.
I do think he's a hero, but I don't like that he's currently in Russia. I think the President should pardon him for whistleblowing and bring him home, but also never give him security clearance (or allow him to work with those that have it). I'm grateful for him outing constitutional violations by the NSA, but I'm also worried about his loyalties.