Where's the monopoly (or rather oligopoly) you are talking about?
There's many models offered by many companies and labs that are close enough to state of the art. Many of them are completely open source or at least have open weights.
You might complain about outsourcing your thinking to a machine, sure. But there's no monopoly nor oligopoly.
Google, currently thought of as the AI leader has shown time and time again they will resort to monopolistic practices.
I really hope open source models are the way, but the fact is the vast majority of day to day usage of LLMs is on models owned by multi-bullion dollar companies.
And even if they're not monopolies, people being influenced by companies to this extent should worry people.
It's news to me that Google is the AI leader. Where did you get that information / impression? I'd assumed that if anyone is a leader, it's OpenAI, but even their lead seems pretty tenuous at best.
And people trying shading things doesn't make a monopoly. Especially if there's plenty of competition.
> "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- F Herbert, 1965
I want to emphasise the "other men with machines" part. Mr Herbert wasn't talking about an AI takeover. He was talking about a techbro takeover.
He didn't even believe in the agency of machines, just human potential - an inanimate thing that does not want, will not want to take over. It is a tool for the people who command it and do.
Not just our thinking, but our search for truth. The biggest problem I see is that models can hallucinate or be biased (for example, Grok being told explicitly not to mention Trump and Musk when asked about misinformation) for the benefit of their owners or creators. This happens with Chinese models too, of course, because of their laws.
The problem is that people just trust what the LLM tells them, not realising they can be misled, or the model tells them "you're right" without any pushback or invitation to think further—just like an echo chamber, the consequences of which we've seen with social media in the last few years
There's many models offered by many companies and labs that are close enough to state of the art. Many of them are completely open source or at least have open weights.
You might complain about outsourcing your thinking to a machine, sure. But there's no monopoly nor oligopoly.