Now, LLMs have the potential to become part of that backbone, yet nobody seems particularly concerned that they’re not open source (I'm talking about GPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini). I know there are open source alternatives, but they’re not nearly as capable—and it seems most people here are perfectly fine using and paying for the proprietary ones.
I don’t like a future where I have to pay for every token just to write a program. And don’t tell me, "Well, just don’t use LLMs"; they’re going to become what Linux is today: ubiquitous.
I think LLMs might follow this market pattern where you can buy something to host yourself and then commoditization happens enough where open source solutions will also evolve to have good enough solutions.
An idea for a disrupting company would be to open source their LLM and offer support and feature development to enterprises as the paid offering, kinda like Red Hat or others doing that model. A key difference is running an LLM locally on decent sized compute is fine but it will be costly to scale on your own.
LLMs are natural language models (what words are likely to come next given the context), not any sort of AGI. For that purpose, the gap between open and closed models is closing much faster in LLMs than CAD. I think LLMs will go the way of chess engines -- one of these models will become the Stockfish of LLMs and the proprietary models will end up being a waste of money and resources.
You don't really need to worry then. There is no future like that in the long run. No future at all.
If you think a little, you'll realize AI breaks a number of pillars holding society in a working state.
The thing forces the labor value of time to zero while simultaneously eliminating economic calculation in the factor markets, and eliminating capital formation.
There is a saying, businesses sometimes win so much that they lose. This is one of those times. All that lay ahead is a maelstrom of mathematical chaos, and the only ones that will survive are those not in it.
For what it's worth, I absolutely share your concerns around the fact that LLM models are now proprietary. I want to see more open-source (or at least open-weight) models being built
They certainly are capable (DeepSeek being the obvious example), the problem is that they're still too expensive to run and there's no currently differentiator to compete with the big players who are likely selling inference at a loss.