alt Hacker News> a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge
More like a war on the traditional, human-based knowledge, leveraged by people who believe that via coveting the world's supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and what not, can achieve their own monopoly on knowledge under the pretense of liberating it. Note that running your own LLM becomes impossible if you can no longer afford the hardware to run it on.
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Surely we'll all beat monopolies by running our own local LLMs, storing whole blockchains on our local storage, building our own atomic power plants, flying our own airlines and launching our own satellites via our own rocket fleets. And producing our own trillion-transistor silicon in our own fabs.
We just have to start printing our own money and buying us some pocket armies and puppet politicians first.
The current bubble's effect on hardware is alarming but if they think they are going to create a permanent economic manipulation they are deluded. The US' hold on controls is eroding at a faster rate and China will be making good enough all the faster if its price/spec ratio is absurdly high.
Crypto currency makers can have artificial limits but no amount of limiting gpt-next access is cutting access to good enough.
Better that I'm forced to rent an LLM from a tech monopolist for a few dollars than be forced to hire a member of the lawyers cartel for $500 an hour.