"It built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive. That isn’t a revolution."
It is a revolution. Free models are out there. The "toll booths" (software companies) might not survive, but if that's the case, that is the revolution: Because something that you had to pay a massive "toll" for is now essentially free. That might not help the AI companies but it will be a revolution for everyone else that had to pay the tolls, likely making everything cheaper and everyone better off.
(Yes, everyone. Even a very poor person in a highly developed European country lives better than a mildly rich person before the industrial revolution, and I'd say the average person lives at the levels even royalty could barely dream of.)
Even if this bites the AI labs and they don't survive, building software is not going to become significantly more expensive than it currently is with free models that are being sold at cost (barring something major like a global nuclear war), mainly because you can always continue to run the existing models on existing hardware even if progress were to magically stop.
ThrowawayR2•44m ago
Models only have information up to the date when they were generated. APIs get updated and expanded, new frameworks and libraries get introduced, bugs get fixed. How long is an existing model going to still be useful? A year or two at most?
As existing models become out of date, somebody has to pay the massive cost for training updated models to replace them, including, of course, the free models.
wasabinator•42m ago
Props to the author, this is very well written. Makes a lot of sense.
tgsovlerkhgsel•59m ago
"It built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive. That isn’t a revolution."
It is a revolution. Free models are out there. The "toll booths" (software companies) might not survive, but if that's the case, that is the revolution: Because something that you had to pay a massive "toll" for is now essentially free. That might not help the AI companies but it will be a revolution for everyone else that had to pay the tolls, likely making everything cheaper and everyone better off.
(Yes, everyone. Even a very poor person in a highly developed European country lives better than a mildly rich person before the industrial revolution, and I'd say the average person lives at the levels even royalty could barely dream of.)
Even if this bites the AI labs and they don't survive, building software is not going to become significantly more expensive than it currently is with free models that are being sold at cost (barring something major like a global nuclear war), mainly because you can always continue to run the existing models on existing hardware even if progress were to magically stop.
ThrowawayR2•44m ago
As existing models become out of date, somebody has to pay the massive cost for training updated models to replace them, including, of course, the free models.