alt Hacker NewsIt is the largest democratization of knowledge that ever happened.
The 'sell it back to us' argument falls short in my view.
Free versions are abundant, and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.
The comment here seems incredibly pessimistic and quite dramatical.
Replies
Ah, this remembers me when I was also young and naive.
Good times when we thought the internet would be great for democracy because knowledge would be easily available for everyone. Fast forward to 2026 and even the leader of terrible communist regime like China is looking better than the shitheads we got on the democratic west..
There are no viable free versions with sufficient computing power. The do-it-yourself AI is dangled as a carrot in front of users to camouflage the lock-in and rent seeking by Big AI. Go prove something new like Navier Stokes (replicating N-S itself no longer counts due to scraping and plagiarism) on your Mac Pro!
Paid influencers who perpetuate the open narrative are a whole new industry.
Even if there were open models, it is still IP theft and would not be "democratization" but "forced unpaid nationalization".
It is woefully pessimistic indeed.
There will be new jobs coming from this.
The bountiful abundance of intelligence is truly the best thing that has happened this decade.
Wiki already democratized it just fine and was legitimately free for people who know how to read.
It's asinine that you think the sell it back to us argument falls short.
Not only does it distill our history to try to sound like some average version of us, it sounds like the blandest versions of us... And then sells this back to us.
From a coding standpoint, the tech is good and gets the job done. The pillaging of all other aspects of human history is just sad. With the only solace I'm seeing is that future training has to train on the dogshit versions of the internet that are now infected with LLM content.
> Free versions are abundant,
Awesome, can I make my own competitive LLM, just like I can make my own open source software?
> and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.
Considering hardware prices, that "some time" is doing super heavy lifting. It could be 10-15+ years before that happens and the local LLM is actually useful. Most people don't see hardware prices declining from current prices until at least 2030, likely much longer.
The comment seems in line with real life, while your catchphrase about democratization is more like wishful thinking.