What about third world programmers? They can’t necessarily afford a $5000 GPU. If it weren’t for the “generosity” of tech companies like GitHub granting free LLM usage, they might be locked out entirely. This would put them at a disadvantage, we can argue to what degree but it’s still a disadvantage.

Depending on the curve we’re on, LLMs may grow more resource hungry while becoming closer to human performance in software engineering tasks. It’s not unimaginable this would concentrate productivity in the upper class of software engineers that can afford the hardware and/or licenses.

Is it your expectation that as models get cheaper we won't be developing much more powerful models at the higher price range?

Its already worth noting that we already ran into the self hosting at scale problem. People don't want to run a web server and instead accept all the problems that come along with the convenience of social media. Why would LLMs, or any future AI product, be different?

No, it was not. It was not better than o1, nor o1-pro. Yes, it was _cheaper_ than those models, and superior in price/performance if the performance was acceptable. But in terms of raw performance it was behind them.

> but eventually people will have had enough

As a Venezuelan, I thought so too. 25 years on...

When a potential power imbalance is created, those willing to use it for selfish means will almost always win in the end.

Anyone with morals driving their use of a new tech will be limited, and unless those people massively outnumber the few selfish ones they will lose eventually.

The ability to inject your preferred biases into the system that people use for finding or generating nearly all information they consume on a day-to-day basis is extremely powerful. Eg, if all "term papers" produced by this plagiarism machine are now 20% more favourable to the machine's owner than they would otherwise be, that can have significant, compounding long-term effects.

Of course, similar things could be said about controlling information flow through: social networks, newspapers, printed books, or whatever the town crier shouts in town square. But, each advancement in information dissemination tends to be power concentrating relative to the older tech, and I don't see any reason why this most recent advance won't follow that trend.

Definitely not everyone. For many of us, checks and balances are a feature not a bug.

A spark can start a fire, it doesn't seem wise to ignore history. Things can always get out of control even for the ones up there on top of the pyramid of power.