[cjfd]

The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.

[tkel]

Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect.

Democracy is about governance, not access.

A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.

[jasode]

>Democracy is about governance, not access.

It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...

[mannykannot]

With the consequence that disambiguation may be needed.

[foo42]

I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.

[woctordho]

You may check Prime Intellect's prime-diloco and Nous Research's DisTrO

[tbrownaw]

The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have.

(Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)

[xorcist]

But the LLMs are quite the opposite: People should not bother with developing software, but ask the big LLM providers to do it for them instead.

In all aspects of the term, software is getting less democratized. But that is in line with a decades long trend, where computers used to ship with BASIC installed and now you need a specialized IDE tool which has a learning curve.

It used to be that you could dabble with HTML but now you need to learn a few javascript frameworks just to modify existing code. You used to start a piece of software by running it, modern server software is a fragile jigsaw that is delivered to production in the cloud. The list goes on. The future we are being promised is that you ask your paid-for development agent to make the necessary changes you require and deliver in to production in the cloud.

Which is fine, in a way, but it shifts power to the professionals. Just as Google, Apple or Microsoft owns your identity and your data, and you pay to use it, they can also decide to deny access for any reason. They are private companies, after all, and it is their data.

[tkel]

If software development were democratized, then decisions that software developers make would be made democratically. On or off the job. On the job, the workplace would be run democratically, instead of as it is now, dictatorially. Or off the job, groups of engineers would be coming together to create governance and make collective decisions about the software they use, like the Debian project or the recent Nix governance. Neither is the case.

Building yourself a table using some new carbon fiber hammer isn't democracy. That's just consumerism.

[nextaccountic]

Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services.

The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the opposite of democracy

[Wobbles42]

This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility.

Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.

[nextaccountic]

The problem is compute and memory. I think OpenAI bought RAM supply mainly to choke the ability of consumer hardware to run open weight models (that hit the memory bottleneck before other constraints). Now there's a shortage in other components as well. I don't see how local AI can compete in usefulness.

[Havoc]

It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools.

What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers

[elzbardico]

Programming is probably the most democratized profession ever.

The problem was never access barriers, but the fact that people are too lazy to study even a 200-300 pages on something as simple as ruby on rails.

[analog31]

I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering.

It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all.

But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition.

A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.

[wiseowise]

This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?

[just6979]

Because programmers made the LLMs, and they first applied it to the problems they know, so the examples of "replacing a programmer" are abundant. Then the hype train rolled in and now it's suddenly going to replace everything, just that software engineering is the low-hanging fruit since they already have "proof" that it works in that domain.

Hint: it actually doesn't work at real depth, and why not is fairly well explained in TFA: they hype always overestimates the depth of the field. So these advances do help to make easy thing easy (in the case of LLMs because they have been trained on a billion examples of the easy stuff), but don't really end up helping with the hard things (because they really only make new things that weren't encompassed in their training by getting lucky, and because tedious things are different than hard things).

[braebo]

There will be, code was just a natural first start because it’s just text.

[zdragnar]

Overly optimistic people are already talking about using LLM based AI as a way to provide healthcare access in underserved (i.e. rural) areas. There's already lots of studies going on for things like using AI to identify tumors and cancers in MRI and other images.

There's national headlines every few months for lawyers getting in trouble for submitting LLM hallucinated citations in court, so lawyers are starting to do it to themselves as well.

It's early days yet, because unlike most CRUD apps, the consequences of hallucinations and outright bad calls in medicine and law are life ending. Unless the bubble pops soon, it's coming though.

[just6979]

CS programs have high attrition rates because programming or "coding" has been touted as easy money for a couple few decades now. When people find out it's not so easy, they bail. Holding a few layers of abstractions in your head is not something that everyone does easily.

Just as keeping most of the structure of a 4-novel-long story in your head is not something everyone can do, hence why being a successful author is not something that everyone can do. Start telling everyone that being a novelist is easy money, though, and you'll see Comp 101 courses filling up and the attrition rate correspondingly go through the roof.

[elzbardico]

Yeah. There's a barrier also for professional surfing, soccer, cinema acting, submarine soldering, cooking.

Lots of people bought thousand dollars worth of cooking books and still make food their dogs turn the noses with disgust at.

Maybe there's some fucking talent requirement to do that stuff, even if just a little bit, to the despair of all Project/Product Manager types that secretly hate and despise software engineers.

[just6979]

Anyone could make their own tools before this as well. Just needed to learn something first.

Real democratizing or programming is free access to compilers, SDKs, etc. AI coding does nothing to help that. In fact, it hurts it, because those non-programmers only get access to the AI tools on the terms of the AI companies. Sure they could train their own models, but then we're back to having to learn things.

[ares623]

They can rent their own tools, more like.

[Kinrany]

No, they can make their own tools. They rent someone else's tools in the process of making their own tools.

[tkiolp4]

Not entirely true. For instance if I use LLMs to build an ios app I still need to pay apple $100 to use my own app for an undetermined amount of time.

If I build a web app i still need to pay for a domain, for a server for egress.

We are just renting. Wouldn’t be surprised if in the future this gets even more depressing

[ares623]

They can continue renting to maintain the tools they make.

[just6979]

They _have to_ continue renting, because they didn't learn anything while "making" those tools.

[matheusmoreira]

One day people will not even be able to own computers anymore. They will be owned, controlled and rented out by corporate elites for limited purposes only. The personal computer will probably either cease to exist due to economic factors. It will probably be made illegal for citizens to own free computers. We'll probably need licenses to operate one.

The mere concept of people "making their own tools" is just comical in this bleak timeline.

[ldng]

Terrible argument. They always could learn and DIY.

[edgyquant]

You have to have a knack for it, most people are not programmer types

[simonw]

I don't think it's about being a "type" so much as choosing what to specialize in.

I could learn plumbing skills and do the plumbing around my house. I've chosen not to.

[sarchertech]

There’s definitely a type. My wife is much smarter and harder working than me, near perfect SAT score, made it through an engineering degree at a much better school than I went to. Then did med school, residency, and fellowship.

She’s insanely quick. I once told her about one way hashing and before I was even half way through the explanation. Before I and ever said a thing about what they were used for she stops me and says “oh so that’s why websites can’t just send you your password when you forget it”.

At her job she has to call time of death for kids, tell people their kid has cancer, deal with people who literally want her dead, work shifts where she is the one ultimately responsible for the life and death of every patient that walks in the door, and work 7a-4p one day then 10p-7a the next.

She can do all that but she says that she hated her Matlab class in college more than anything else and she could absolutely never do my job because she doesn’t have it in her to bang her head against a wall chasing down a bug for an hour that turns out to be a typo.

[nevertoolate]

Sounds like you are in a wonderful relationship, I’m glad!

[kqr]

... if they are privileged enough to be able to take time away from family and jobs.

The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this learning less expensive for those with little of both time and money. That's what's meant by democratised.

[cyanydeez]

The people taking the lead in most of Ai in America are bootlickers of fascism. So not much difference than China on a long enough time line.

[Havoc]

The US losing the plot doesn’t change the fact that the tech is fundamentally democraticism on a personal level.

If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental freedom gain an “individuals can make tools without knowing coding” isn’t going anywhere

[cyanydeez]

You'd bet that if LLMs were democratizing, they'd be 100's of feet away from it.

That they're charging in suggests it can be just as feudal as every other technology. It has no moral value. It's a tool; a butcher can swing an axe in the kitchen as much as in the battlefield.

[xg15]

It's "democratizing" in the same way Uber "democratized" taxis...

[Kinrany]

Taxi became more accessible and reliable, didn't it

[oblio]

For a second, while the hook was sinking in the fish's lip. Now Uber is being "democratized" to billions in profits.

[cratermoon]

have you priced an Uber lately?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

That's a great point but you didn't make your linux machine yourself. A large tech corp made it, and each of its parts. Some of us could probably make their own computers but I don't think I'd be able to make one smaller than the house I live in. There's something to be said about large-scale automation and that's not that it "democratizes" anything. Like you say: quite the opposite.

[heliumtera]

You are assuming democracy wasn't designed to crush the individual and reduce autonomy at all cost. How cute.