alt Hacker NewsInteresting point, overlooking the biggest part:
"It built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive. That isn’t a revolution."
It is a revolution. Free models are out there. The "toll booths" (software companies) might not survive, but if that's the case, that is the revolution: Because something that you had to pay a massive "toll" for is now essentially free. That might not help the AI companies but it will be a revolution for everyone else that had to pay the tolls, likely making everything cheaper and everyone better off.
(Yes, everyone. Even a very poor person in a highly developed European country lives better than a mildly rich person before the industrial revolution, and I'd say the average person lives at the levels even royalty could barely dream of.)
Even if this bites the AI labs and they don't survive, building software is not going to become significantly more expensive than it currently is with free models that are being sold at cost (barring something major like a global nuclear war), mainly because you can always continue to run the existing models on existing hardware even if progress were to magically stop.
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Models only have information up to the date when they were generated. APIs get updated and expanded, new frameworks and libraries get introduced, bugs get fixed. How long is an existing model going to still be useful? A year or two at most?
As existing models become out of date, somebody has to pay the massive cost for training updated models to replace them, including, of course, the free models.
Your last paragraph doesn’t hold water.
Yesterday’s models produced okay small results, but unmaintainable large results. People bet that models would continue to improve, so that tomorrow’s model can fix today’s slop. This is a gamble, and it’s not clear yet whether it will pay off. If that progress stops for any reason, you end up stuck with a model that’s good at starting things, but not good at maintaining them, and a bunch of code that gets more and more expensive to maintain. https://maevyn.codes/decoherence is worth a read.
And that’s quite apart from the inherent decay due to information/reality drift.
> Massive toll
Example? "Massive" is relative, and it's almost never actually massive to the person paying. Software is incredibly cheap.
Adobe is primarily a professional program and even at higher fees it's a miniscule amount compared to the rate of the professional using it. Adobe isn't scooping up 20% of their earnings, it's more on the order of 0.07%.
The entities seemingly paying "massive tolls" are large corporations, who pay the big bucks because they're paying per seat, employing tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The toll per-person is, again, absolutely tiny and nothing compared to the salaries paid.
So in exchange for devaluing the labor of anyone in the firing lines of AI, removing a path to building a business with time, smarts and energy instead of capital, not actually fixing the lower and middle classes main categories of expenses (food,housing,healthcare) where is it going to make everyone better off?
I feel like anyone optimistic about these changes hasn't actually thought it through..