[chatmasta]

Is that the analogy you're choosing? I'm not sure much of a wealth gap exists in software in general. In many ways software is the most egalitarian product in history, since it costs nothing to copy it. Sure, not everyone can afford a $60 game, but there are no $6,000 games.

I think a better analogy (or perhaps a more specific one, since you did mention "web services") would be computing services, i.e. rich startups with hundreds of thousands in credits and funding vs. single bootstrapped founder with a little bit of cash.

[wsgeorge]

> In many ways software is the most egalitarian product in history,

Indeed, and that's kind of my point. Even in the most egalitarian product in history, a bit of a wealth gap exists. It's inescapable. That $60 game may not cost $6,000, but it won't run on cheap hardware. And it'll probably depend on a good, high speed Internet connection to acquire in the first place...

Current AI is either relatively low cost but centralized, or very expensive to run locally. I believe AI will be more egalitarian than software in general (as Stanford Alpaca showed), if a lot of work is done to make inference at the edge practical.

The open community shouldn't lose sight of this.

[chatmasta]

Yeah, I think the underlying theme here is that there is a wealth gap in early adoption of new technology. Nowadays you can buy a Chromebook for $200, but in the late 1990s you'd be lucky to get a computer for under $2000. That led to wealthier kids getting earlier access to computers, which gave them an advantage in early development as compared to their peers who never had the same opportunities. I agree we'll probably see a similar curve with AI.

It's probably worth anticipating and finding a way to mitigate it. In the early days of computers and the internet, schools and libraries had computer labs that were a decent equalizer for kids who didn't have them at home. Maybe we should be thinking about how to make early AI similarly accessible.