alt Hacker NewsEven as the field evolves, the phoning home telemetry of closed models creates a centralized intelligence monopoly. If open source atrophies, we lose the public square of architectural and design reasoning, the decision graph that is often just as important as the code. The labs won't just pick up new patterns; they will define them, effectively becoming the high priests of a new closed-loop ecosystem.
However, the risk isn't just a loss of "truth," but model collapse. Without the divergent, creative, and often weird contributions of open-source humans, AI risks stagnating into a linear combination of its own previous outputs. In the long run, killing the commons doesn't just make the labs powerful. It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale.
Humans will likely continue to drive consensus building around standards. The governance and reliability benefits of open source should grow in value in an AI-codes-it-first world.
> It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale.
My read of the recent discussion is that people assume that the work of far fewer number of elites will define the patterns for the future. For instance, implementation of low-level networking code can be the combination of patterns of zeromq. The underlying assumption is that most people don't know how to write high-performance concurrent code anyway, so why not just ask them to command the AI instead.