22 ms·

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals

by latexr 8mo ago

> I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping. This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking. LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.

zpeti 8mo ago
> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc. How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever. (I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).
- antonvs 8mo ago
  I agree with your general point, but there's an important qualifier: > when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models. You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.
app134 8mo ago
Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing is not productive. There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.
- latexr 8mo ago
  If I believed it was a different opinion I wouldn’t even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole reply. The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point. People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding. I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up with themselves, especially if they disagree with mine. But what is not productive is arguing with a proxy. > I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
  - rpdillon 8mo ago
    You're overthinking it. Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce useful programs. That's it. It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what the technology enables, and it's a simple enough observation that millions of people can independently arrive at that conclusion, and some of them might even refer to it as "democratization".
    - rglover 8mo ago
      > Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. This is a good thing. It's a filter for the careless, lazy, and incompetent. LLMs are to programming what a microwave is to food. I'm not a chef because I can nuke a hot pocket. "Vibe coders" (not AI-assisted coding) are the programming equivalent of the people on Kitchen Nightmares. Go figure, it's a community rife with narcissism, too.
  - 8mo ago
63stack 8mo ago
I agree completely, the "democratizing programming" is being overplayed by AI vendors like they are doing community service, and HN commenters use it like a trump card in an argument. Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any open source project, publish any of their code, run any of their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this democracy where idiots are running ai agents that publish smear campaigns, or harass maintainers for not accepting their slop is the democratic future you wish for? How many (job) positions do you see today that want a backend developer? Frontend developer? Not much because now everyone is expected to be at least full stack, if not also devops as well. The exact same thing is playing out right now with AI, people are expected to produce 5x the amount of code before, if you don't, someone else will take your job that is willing to do it. Already bloated programs will bloat further, they will require even more resources to run, you will have to pay even more for hardware, they will be slower, less responsive, you will have to pay yet another monthly fee to big tech for their AIs, and people will happily do it and pat themselves that we democratized programming, while running towards the future where nobody will be able to own hardware capable of general computing.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  > ...I haven't yet tried the big local ones, because how would that be better? I'm still paying to big tech to run it, just in a different way Why blame big tech when they're just providing a service at a fair cost (3rd party inference is incredibly cheap)? I'm not sure how that makes sense.
  - 63stack 8mo ago
    I removed this line because people will get hung up on it and not see the forest from the tree.
crazygringo 8mo ago
> LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. They absolutely are. Anytime new knowledge or skills become widely available to everyone, that's a term used for it. > There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. None of that has anything to do with anything. There's competition between companies to keep prices low and accessibility high. I think you are simply misunderstanding the word "democratic". It isn't just political. From MW: > 3 : relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people Here, it's specifically about making things available to the broad masses of the people that wasn't before. This isn't a matter of opinion. It's just the meaning of the word.
- latexr 8mo ago
  Those things were already available. That’s the point. What do you think LLMs are trained on?
  - crazygringo 8mo ago
    Huh? There was no tool that could easily whip up a 300 line script to do something for me when I didn't know how to code, and do it in just seconds. The topic here is the democratization of a whole set of new abilities. Not just knowledge.
    - shufflerofrocks 8mo ago
      >when I didn't know how to code ....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort. LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.
      - crazygringo 8mo ago
        > To think you had to put in effort. But that's the whole point... When things that previously took hundreds of hours of effort to learn now become available with just a few minutes, they become available to all -- even those without all that extra time, which is most people who have a lot of other competing priorities in their lives. That's democratization. I don't understand why you're trying to argue against that. It's a dictionary definition. It's just a meaning of the word. Whatever you seem to be upset about is something else, I don't know what.
signatoremo 8mo ago
> here’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. That would not happen, simply because those companies' interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play out. And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search is well and alive. > You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn. We have way more free resources at the moment. Name anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of surfacing that resource. > This parroted argument Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased) if it's against your own beliefs.

by latexr 8mo ago

zpeti 8mo ago

> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc. How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever. (I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).

antonvs 8mo ago
I agree with your general point, but there's an important qualifier: > when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models. You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.

app134 8mo ago

Dismissing someone with a different opinion as astroturfing is not productive. There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.

latexr 8mo ago
If I believed it was a different opinion I wouldn’t even have written the first paragraph, or maybe the whole reply. The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point. People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding. I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up with themselves, especially if they disagree with mine. But what is not productive is arguing with a proxy. > I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
- rpdillon 8mo ago
  You're overthinking it. Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce useful programs. That's it. It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what the technology enables, and it's a simple enough observation that millions of people can independently arrive at that conclusion, and some of them might even refer to it as "democratization".
  - rglover 8mo ago
    > Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. This is a good thing. It's a filter for the careless, lazy, and incompetent. LLMs are to programming what a microwave is to food. I'm not a chef because I can nuke a hot pocket. "Vibe coders" (not AI-assisted coding) are the programming equivalent of the people on Kitchen Nightmares. Go figure, it's a community rife with narcissism, too.
- 8mo ago

63stack 8mo ago

I agree completely, the "democratizing programming" is being overplayed by AI vendors like they are doing community service, and HN commenters use it like a trump card in an argument. Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any open source project, publish any of their code, run any of their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this democracy where idiots are running ai agents that publish smear campaigns, or harass maintainers for not accepting their slop is the democratic future you wish for? How many (job) positions do you see today that want a backend developer? Frontend developer? Not much because now everyone is expected to be at least full stack, if not also devops as well. The exact same thing is playing out right now with AI, people are expected to produce 5x the amount of code before, if you don't, someone else will take your job that is willing to do it. Already bloated programs will bloat further, they will require even more resources to run, you will have to pay even more for hardware, they will be slower, less responsive, you will have to pay yet another monthly fee to big tech for their AIs, and people will happily do it and pat themselves that we democratized programming, while running towards the future where nobody will be able to own hardware capable of general computing.

zozbot234 8mo ago
> ...I haven't yet tried the big local ones, because how would that be better? I'm still paying to big tech to run it, just in a different way Why blame big tech when they're just providing a service at a fair cost (3rd party inference is incredibly cheap)? I'm not sure how that makes sense.
- 63stack 8mo ago
  I removed this line because people will get hung up on it and not see the forest from the tree.

crazygringo 8mo ago

> LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. They absolutely are. Anytime new knowledge or skills become widely available to everyone, that's a term used for it. > There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. None of that has anything to do with anything. There's competition between companies to keep prices low and accessibility high. I think you are simply misunderstanding the word "democratic". It isn't just political. From MW: > 3 : relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people Here, it's specifically about making things available to the broad masses of the people that wasn't before. This isn't a matter of opinion. It's just the meaning of the word.

latexr 8mo ago
Those things were already available. That’s the point. What do you think LLMs are trained on?
- crazygringo 8mo ago
  Huh? There was no tool that could easily whip up a 300 line script to do something for me when I didn't know how to code, and do it in just seconds. The topic here is the democratization of a whole set of new abilities. Not just knowledge.
  - shufflerofrocks 8mo ago
    >when I didn't know how to code ....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort. LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.
    - crazygringo 8mo ago
      > To think you had to put in effort. But that's the whole point... When things that previously took hundreds of hours of effort to learn now become available with just a few minutes, they become available to all -- even those without all that extra time, which is most people who have a lot of other competing priorities in their lives. That's democratization. I don't understand why you're trying to argue against that. It's a dictionary definition. It's just a meaning of the word. Whatever you seem to be upset about is something else, I don't know what.

signatoremo 8mo ago

> here’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal. That would not happen, simply because those companies' interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play out. And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search is well and alive. > You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn. We have way more free resources at the moment. Name anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of surfacing that resource. > This parroted argument Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased) if it's against your own beliefs.