kind of disagree here. on the surface this makes sense, but this isn't "Adobe Pro vs Freemium version" where some tiny vertical slice of your business can be made slightly more efficient with a b2b enterprise plan. this is generalized intelligence and literally everybody can benefit from it in an immeasurable number of ways. i would go as far as to actually compare it more to water or air than a tool.
if only the hyper wealthy can access the pure water that doesn't give you cancer while the rest of us drink from the Ganges river/sub-100iq models that drool and hallucinate/waste time, then I would say that's pretty terrible for the world. it'll just create extreme disparity in our world, far far worse than anything that exists today.
and you may think, man what a ridiculous example, but think about it this way: what happens when something like Mythos or some future model can actually solve your specific cancer (we're getting closer and closer), but is entirely impossible to afford? Or perhaps you need boosters that require the AI to create more of, and now you're reliant on a model that is too expensive.
I’m entirely in agreement with this POV, but I’m also copacetic about it:
You could have said much the same about computers in the world dominated by IBM mainframes 60 years ago. Now we have vastly more powerful computers on our wrists (or our pacemakers!), let alone in our pockets or on our desks.
As far as my understanding goes the bottleneck for what you are talking about is hardware not software, so open source won't help that much for the foreseeable future.
> and you may think, man what a ridiculous example, but think about it this way: what happens when something like Mythos or some future model can actually solve your specific cancer (we're getting closer and closer), but is entirely impossible to afford? Or perhaps you need boosters that require the AI to create more of, and now you're reliant on a model that is too expensive.
Isn't that already the case with current care? Wealthy people get a standard of care poor people couldn't even dream of. Rich people live, temporarily embarrassed millionaires die.
Looks like a marxist revolution is soon going to be on the mind of a lot of programmers. We've finally reached the point where the "means of production" in software are back in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
It was good while it lasted. But now that only the wealthy can afford access to the best models, software development is starting to look like most other industries, no longer a place where some dude from nowhere can build something cool from his basement because he will be competing with huge companies with unlimited access to those models.
Seriously, this movement already had its Marx - Richard Stallman. I think the "leaders" will appear over time, as with any socialist movement, they are naturally bottom up and leaders only appear after demands are formed in the zeitgeist. The (partly successful) socialist novement that brought social democracy to the West during cca 1920s - 1960s didn't really have leaders, it was a collective realization.
Guess we'll see what OpenAI does with their next model release -- but this move is doing nothing to get me to come back to Claude after switching away due to their reliability issues.
In a way I relish the opportunity to just make do with cheap Chinese models, massage my prompts, and go back to coding by hand. If this is how it's going to be, screw 'em.
I don't make money on the code I am writing right now. I really don't like where this trend might go.
most people can afford it for a few special projects now and then. but for me, I have been trying to avoid Opus as a daily driver for a couple of versions.
People making high-end salaries can afford Fable for critical parts of their projects though.
It's not a conspiracy. There's a finite amount of compute available, and they will sell it to the highest bidder. If another company can produce the same intelligence for cheaper, then they will drive the price down.