alt Hacker NewsHow about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
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1. Being offered a service you would pay a lot of money for is a step forward. When people pay a large amount of money for something that means they wanted the thing more than the money. The link between ChatGPT and libraries being under threat seems a bit weak too.
2. The Chinese have been investing a lot into free models, they're perfectly good and keep improving; despite the best efforts of the US. They're even ramping into making their own hardware. Gemma 4 is pretty snappy too. It doesn't seem like there is much of a moat to this, my guess is there will be perfectly good local models if you want to avoid AI companies.
Free, downloadable AI models have consistently caught up to ChatGPT within 3 months, for almost a year now.
I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.
A digital library needs almost no funding. With today's decentralized networking infrastructure such as BitTorrent and IPFS I bet it just exists forever.
Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask everything locally for free.
> while the library itself has lost funding
Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.
How about the idea that one day you might be paying a subscription to use a service while non sequitur.
> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?
Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.