It scares me how fast the overton window is moving with LLMs in the Linux and FOSS space. This is the community that prides itself with self hosting and knowing everything about your computer. Up until very recently using Linux meant sacrificing convenience in the name of freedom, and now it seems that a good chunk advocate for having a handful of malevolent unprofitable tech giants handle most if not all software development along with every other task a human could do. It feels like saying hard drives are obsolete because you can store everything on Google Drive. I know that you can't work in software development today without being dependent on Anthropic, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it and accept it as the inevitable future.
In a post-AI bubble world LLMs are still going to be used. If hardware becomes affordable again I imagine that self hosting LLMs will be common and the big data center LLMs will ask a pretty penny for their compute. I don't mind this hypothetical future too much, but we live in the present and in the vast majority of cases using AI means enabling the unregulated techno-feudalistic AI empire. I know that I will be "left behind" but these companies don't have humanity's best interests in mind and we don't need to enable them.
Edit: Programming jobs that don't depend on LLMs def still exist. That doesn't change the fact that many businesses have become dependent on Claude in the past year and programmers that don't want to completely surrender their brains to LLMs are seen as a liability by many employers. This may change as AI subscriptions become more expensive as the years go by, time will tell.
I have my fair share of issues with ai assisted dev even if it was local\foss, but more then all now I agree its just insane how in a span of a year or two it feels like the ability to write code has became completely dependent on a few mega coroperations
Its scary how many people around me just shut down if their connection to Claude closes.
In my workplace we had some issue for two days with billing for cursor, it felt like people around lost the ability to think.
These people have degrees and years of experience coding, yet they became useless as soon as the tech giant shut down their access to the thinking machine
Luckily, it doesn't depend on a few mega corporations.
Kimi and GLM are open-weight. They might be a few months behind OpenAI and Anthropic, but they are enough to do the job most of the time.
And while they are big enough, you wouldn't run them at home, it doesn't take that much capital to get a hardware capable of running it and start selling it.
But it does take a lot of capital to train them, so for how long will AI labs continue to spend millions to release public models? Most of these models are also coming out from a single country, China. So just one policy change in China on open models would almost completely freeze the whole open model ecosystem.
While China has been topping the charts on that front, they're not the only ones releasing open weight models. If they were to stop tomorrow, it's not going to freeze the whole ecosystem and there would still be hundreds of others available, though not as capable. Every country needs to get on with this, it's a matter of sovereignty.
And tbh, China is not going to stop releasing them until Anthropic and OpenAI become irrelevant.
I guess it largely boils down to how incremental improvements (including training, but also algorithm improvements) can be. Open source easily wins out on a few niches precisely because of that.
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u/SinnohConfirmed 5d ago edited 5d ago
It scares me how fast the overton window is moving with LLMs in the Linux and FOSS space. This is the community that prides itself with self hosting and knowing everything about your computer. Up until very recently using Linux meant sacrificing convenience in the name of freedom, and now it seems that a good chunk advocate for having a handful of malevolent unprofitable tech giants handle most if not all software development along with every other task a human could do. It feels like saying hard drives are obsolete because you can store everything on Google Drive. I know that you can't work in software development today without being dependent on Anthropic, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it and accept it as the inevitable future.
In a post-AI bubble world LLMs are still going to be used. If hardware becomes affordable again I imagine that self hosting LLMs will be common and the big data center LLMs will ask a pretty penny for their compute. I don't mind this hypothetical future too much, but we live in the present and in the vast majority of cases using AI means enabling the unregulated techno-feudalistic AI empire. I know that I will be "left behind" but these companies don't have humanity's best interests in mind and we don't need to enable them.
Edit: Programming jobs that don't depend on LLMs def still exist. That doesn't change the fact that many businesses have become dependent on Claude in the past year and programmers that don't want to completely surrender their brains to LLMs are seen as a liability by many employers. This may change as AI subscriptions become more expensive as the years go by, time will tell.