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.