alt Hacker News> How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model?
For now. And that too at a massively discounted rate to drive adoption.
> When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?
Open-weight models require computing power to run. Consumer hardware prices are rising because of AI build-out, so much so that companies that used to serve ordinary consumer markets are switching to serve only datacenters. Megacompute does indeed continue to proliferate.
> One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.
Will this be the case in 20 years? Agentic workflows have come as far as they have in about two years of existence. Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?
> everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to
The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are. A lot of people will lose their livelihoods before goods in particular become "the machine's gifts". What do you think happens then? Will the capital owners who have captured this reduction in costs reduce prices proportionally? Or will they keep the gains for themselves? Do you think governments around the world will tax the upper class to the point of being able to give everyone their current livelihoods through government benefits?
You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism. Not to mention, in your world, gatekeeping the machines would instantly become the most profitable venture possible.
> Not to mention, in your world, gatekeeping the machines would instantly become the most profitable venture possible.
Yes, it would! That's why frontier labs don't open-source their models :)
The point is that the technology is already too democratized for anyone to hold onto it. Google had chatbot LLMs in 2019 and tried to keep them under wraps, how many years did that buy them?
> Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?
I think that things are going to get so much cheaper that we'll still be paid more than enough.
> The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are.
So far, LLMs are great and all, but they only really "fill in the blanks." That's a fundamental limitation of the entire concept of modelling in general; you cannot generalize to out-of-distribution inputs. The bottleneck is going to end up being human beings no matter which way you slice it. Because the bottleneck will be people, more and more of them will be hired, even though each individual is incredibly productive. This is also called Jevon's paradox, when making a resource less expensive leads to overall market growing.
> You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism.
If you went back a thousand years ago and told someone carrying a bucket full of water that one day pipes would run across the civilized world and water would literally be free basically everywhere, they might react the same way. If VLA-driven robots start reducing manufacturing prices, is it so unreasonable to slowly expect more and more things to go that direction?