[do_not_redeem]

That's true for most people for ordinary software too. How many people actually build Linux or Chromium from source? Building Chromium takes more RAM and HD space than most people even have. Yet the world gets immense value from the few who do. I wouldn't want to live in a world where WebKit and Chromium were closed source. You can run a Chromium fork without having to build it yourself. And compute costs will come down over time.

[comex]

> Building Chromium takes more RAM and HD space than most people even have.

According to [1], it takes 16GB of RAM and ~180GB of disk space. Most people have that much. It does take several hours without a many-core machine though.

Building Linux takes much less.

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/...

[do_not_redeem]

I would bet overall most people have those 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC laptops from walmart, etc. If you limit things to developers/gamers/enthusiasts, you'd probably be right.

[oblio]

Those laptops kind of died up to a point, whoever can use an smartphone or tablet used those instead.

[fabiospampinato]

Linux and Chromium seem at the edge of the current scale of "ordinary" open-source software. I think perhaps one should also take into account how much money would be needed to be able to build the thing in reasonable time.

Building Chromium sounds awful, but I'm not sure I'd really need to buy another computer for that. If I did I'm sure I wouldn't need to spend billions on it, most probably not even millions.

For LLaMa I definitely don't have the computer to build it, I definitely don't have the money to buy the computer, even if I won the lottery tomorrow I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have enough money to buy the hardware, even if I had enough money to buy the hardware I'm still not sure I could actually buy it in reasonable time, nvidia may be backlogged for a while, even if I already had all the hardware I probably wouldn't want to retrain llama, and even if I wanted to retrain it the process is probably going to take weeks if not months at best.

Like I think it's one of those things where the difference in magnitude creates a difference in kind, one can't quite meaningfully compare LLaMa with the Calculator app that Ubuntu ships with.

[dartos]

The practicality of building it yourself has nothing to do with an organization affording you that ability.

Also like, gentoo people compile everything