alt Hacker News>but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.
I'm not arguing usefulness. We have many useful tools, programs, and institutions out there. I'm sure some parts of this community directly contributed to such tech.
I'm arguing cost. Costs raise too much (and as you mention, they don't give a flying fuck about those who can't afford it) and we throw LLMs into the pile of "useful yet inaccessible" tools that increases the disparity of the passing and failing kids. So we're back to square one.
>by whom
Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public, and we've seen this playbook being run. They compete until competitors peter out, or they collude to make sure prices all increase in coordination. It's happening now with memory, happened years back with the streaming wars. I see no reason why LLMs are different.
>fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been.
I'm simply asking two questions long term
1. Who foots the bill?
2. Who gets the benefit.
From what I see you haven't answered #2. And for #1 you're just hoping competition keeps prices low despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs. Something's going to give, and history tells me it's not going to be the privileged families.
>Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public,
what I meant is that there isn't a singular entity capable of doing such a rag pull. even if/when closedai and misanthropic do it, open-weights models obviously won't follow.
>Who foots the bill?
primary schoolers don't need $50/1M SOTA. dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough, and even models that can run on consumer hardware are enough for great many things if you know their limitations.
>Who gets the benefit.
students who use it.
again, a LLM can essentially act as a fairly proficient and infinitely patient tutor on every subject, and you have unlimited access to it. that's the application I see for them in education. it would've been amazing to me to have that when I was in school.
>despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs
not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.