alt Hacker NewsThere’s a lot of merit to what you’re saying, but I don’t share that high level of pessimism.
The scenario you describe is basically that software is free as in beer now. We as a corporation don’t really need to bother using GPL/Apache licensed software because we can one-shot something of our own and not deal with with giving back contributions to the open source community.
But that highway goes both directions. That means that the open source community can also one-shot their software, build more with fewer resources, or it might even just devalue proprietary software even further.
If software is so easy to make, what’s the point of keeping it proprietary? I can’t charge you $100/year for Microsoft Word if I can tell Claude Opus 9.0 to clone it with $100 worth of tokens.
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I suppose you're right. All software is about to be as valuable as a single jpeg you see on your Instagram feed.
What matters is physical infrastructure (datacenters), the lead on competitors / open source models, and distribution/mindshare.
>>We don’t really need to bother using GPL/Apache licensed software because we can one-shot something of our own and not bother with giving back contributions.
Thinking of a open weight/source AI as gcc/perl was in the 1990s is more helpful line of approach to take here.
The tool used to achieve a thing must be open.