| If I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are: 1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos 2. the best models are proprietary 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away. Much more powerful lobbies than the OSS ones are losing fights against the LLM companies (the big copyright holders in media). But while companies can use LLMs to build replacements for GPL licensed code (where those LLMs have that GPL code probably in their training set), the reverse thing can also be done: one can break monopolies open using LLMs, and build so much open source software using LLMs. In the end, the GPL is only a means to an end. |
That's the conventional wisdom, but it isn't a given. A lot of financial wizardry is taking place to prop up the best of these things, and even their most ardent proponents are starting to recognize their futility once a certain complexity level is reached. The open weight models are the stalking horse that gives this proposition the most legs, but it's not given that Anthropic and OpenAI exist as anything more than shells of their current selves in 5 years.