I don't believe at all in the idea that cheaper LLMs will somehow "democratize LLMs". Rich people will always be able to buy far more compute than poor people, and we know how to turn more compute into more capability (bigger models, more reasoning and more agents).
The only way to address wealth and power inequality is (in democracies) to vote for governments that will fix it.
Anytime you use absolutes you paint yourself in a corner. Definitely not 100% of things that big tech "democratized", as you put it, has been bad for people.
Presenting it as such does disservice to any serious conversation.
Interesting thing to write in a forum provided for free by big tech. Probably using a browser that big tech offers for free. On a phone or laptop purchased from big tech. Connected using networking gear and software made by big tech.
How much of what you list has been "democratized"? Apart from the forum, and probably the browser, nothing. And both of those things are of questionable goodness to humanity.
> How much of what you list has been "democratized"? Apart from the forum, and probably the browser, nothing
Depends on what you mean by "democratized". It's surely at least as "democratized" as LLM access is, and that was the base line in this discussion. Probably meaning "everybody can use it for not-insane-money instead of just a small elite". (I don't necessarily agree with that notion, but at least we should use the same standards for things.)
> And both of those things are of questionable goodness to humanity.
If you think HN is bad for humanity, why do you participate? I can immediately list 100 things that are worse for humanity. Same thing with your browser.
Those were all centralised. I don't think handing most of the internet over to a handful of big tech giants is the same as democratisation.
For democratisation, I think of open source, open weight models you can run at home, the Fediverse, running your own stuff. I think those are all positive, at least compared to the centralisation.
I for one would prefer to pay for services, than be psychologically manipulated into paying (more, on average) to other companies who are paying to make those services worse.
No, sometimes someone else is paying for it. A classic example would be GPS - paid for by US taxpayers but benefiting the world. Yes now there are, for national security reasons, several other GNSSes but still huge swathes of the world ride free.
Welcome to the capitalism 101. Everything has price. So far, I would say, humanity done quite well under this _oppressive_ regime when compared with others.
I have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.