[aquariusDue]

It's the calculator all over again!

Jokes aside, while I'm almost sure that the ability to code can be lost and regained just like training a muscle what I'm more worried is the rug pull and squeeze that is bound to happen sometime in the next 5 to 10 years unless LLMs go the way of Free Software GNU style. If the latter happens then LLMs for coding will be like calculators and such more or less and personally I don't know how more harmful that would be compared to the boost in productivity.

That said if the former becomes reality (and I hope not!) then we're in for some huge existential crises when people realize they can barely materialize the labour part of their jobs after doing the thinky part and the meetings part.

[timschmidt]

I don't think the rug pull and squeeze are possible. Because I've had the same worry. But using an existing LLM to train or fine tune a new one seems to be standard practice, and to work quite well. So any LLM with an API will end up training all the others - even open source LLMs - and all will benefit. And every day that passes, Moore makes it less and less costly for amateurs to commit the compute necessary for fine tuning, and eventually training from scratch.

In time, even video and embodied training may be possible for amateurs, though that's difficult to contemplate today.

[alwillis]

There are already lots of open source/open weight models than can run locally on a laptop.

People into homelabs have been running AI tools on home servers for years.

[bakugo]

> There are already lots of open source/open weight models than can run locally on a laptop.

And they're all too small and dumb to be useful for anything but the most basic tasks.