Today is the AI equivalent of the PDP11 times in general computing. "Personal computers" were rare, expensive and it was easy for large companies (IBM etc) to g

Today is the AI equivalent of the PDP11 times in general computing. "Personal computers" were rare, expensive and it was easy for large companies (IBM etc) to gate keep. Open source was born in these days, but it really thrived after PCs became commonplace. This will happen for ai training hardware too. And pooling of resources will happen too. Although companies like Google and will do everything in their power to prevent it (like creating a nice inference/training chip and leveraging OS to make it one of the standard tools if AI and making available only a horribly cut down version - Edge TPU, on the market). The only thing that can slow this down this is brain dead stupid regulation which all these large companies, and various "useful idiot" doogooders are lobbying for. Still, this(modern AI) is as powerful ability amplifier for humans as the Internet and the PC itself. I remember when personal computers entered the picture, and the Internet, and I'm telling all you younger people out there, thus is far bigger than that. It(AI) gives far too much knowledge to a common man, you don't understand some technological or scientific concept, an algorithm? Talk to the ai chatbot (unless it happens to hallucinate) you will eventually gain the understanding you seek. I'd give a lot to have access to something like this when I was growing up. What we are currently seeing with all these large companies is the "sell it well below the cost" phase of ai "subscriptions" once everyone makes a non removable part of their life they'll hike up the prices 3 orders of magnitude and everyone will pay, why? Will your job accept a 50% loss of productivity you gained with AI? Will you accept having to use the enshittified search engines when you can ask the AI for anything and get a straight (mostly true) answer? Will a kid that got used to asking the AI to explain every math problem to him be able to progress without it? No. Don't get me wrong.AI is a marvellous force for the good, but there is the dangerous side. Not one promoted by various lobbyist of "ai taking over" no. The danger is that a small number of mega corps will have a leverage against the entire humanity by controlling access to it. Perhaps not even by money, but by regulating your behaviour. Perhaps Google will require you to opt-in will all your personal data to use their latest models. They will analyse you as an individual, for safety of course, so they "don't provide their most powerful models to terrorists, or extremists". What is the antidote to this? Open source models. And leaked commercial models (like llama) until we can create our own.