I find it very sad that people who have been really productive without "AI" now go out of their way to find small anecdotal evidence for "AI".
people who believe in open source don't believe that knowledge should be secret. i have released a lot of open source myself, but i wouldn't consider myself a "true believer." even so, i strongly believe that all information about AI must be as open as possible, and i devote a fair amount of time to reverse engineering various proprietary AI implementations so that i can publish the details of how they work.
why? a couple of reasons:
1) software development is my profession, and i am not going to let anybody steal it from me, so preventing any entity from establishing a monopoly on IP in the space is important to me personally.
2) AI has some very serious geopolitical implications. this technology is more dangerous than the atomic bomb. allowing any one country to gain a monopoly on this technology would be extremely destabilizing to the existing global order, and must be prevented at all costs.
LLMs are very powerful, they will get more powerful, and we have not even scratched the surface yet in terms of fully utilizing them in applications. staying at the cutting edge of this technology, and making sure that the knowledge remains free, and is shared as widely as possible, is a natural evolution for people who share the open source ethos.
But I would stake my very life on the fact that the movement by developers we call open-source is the single greatest community and ethos humanity has ever created.
Of course it inherits from enlightenment and other thinking, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, but it is an extension of the ideologies that came before it.
I challenge anyone to come up with any single modern subcultures that has tangibly generated more that touches more lives, moves more weight, travels farther, effects humanity more every single day from the moment they wake up than the open source software community (in the catholic sense obviously).
Both in moral goodness and in measurable improvement in standard of living and understanding of the universe.
Some people's memories are very short indeed, all who pine pine for who they imagined they were and are consumed by a memetic desire of their imagined selves.
LLMs are useful—but there’s no way such an innovation should be a “guarded secret” even at this early stage.
It’s like saying spreadsheets should have remained a secret when they amplified what people could do when they became mainstream.
The "race against China" is a marketing trick to convince senators to pour billions into "AI". Here is who is financing the whole bubble to a large extent:
good lord.