But traditional barriers have been able to be knocked down more easily with charity, because it's easier to raise charity money for capex than opex.

It was common to have charity drives to get computers into schools, for example, but it's much harder to see people donating money for tokens for poor people.

Previous-generation equipment can be donated, and can still spark an interest in computing and programming. Whereas you literally now can't even use ChatGPT-4.

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conradev 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Small models and processors are going to continue improving to the point that you’ll be able to vibe code locally on your phone at some point.

When the iPhone came out, not everyone had a smartphone. Now 90% of the US has a smartphone, and many of these smartphones run generative local models.

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pc86 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"It's harder to convince other people to pay for this for me" is an insane criticism. Not every AI model needs a premium account, you can even run many excellent models locally if you don't want to pay for an internet connection.

At some point you just have to accept that yes things are easier if you have a little bit of spending money for things. That's not "sad" it's a basic fact of life.

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xnorswap 6 days ago | parent [-]

You have been mean with your interpretation of my statement.

I am not saying, "It's harder to convince other people to pay for this for me".

I am saying, "It is harder for me to pay for this for someone else".

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pc86 6 days ago | parent [-]

It probably is harder to convince others to pay for opex than capex - maybe that's a good thing, maybe not.

But it's certainly not any harder for you to donate this money to someone because they want to spend that money on tokens instead of a computer, for example.

	▲	Zambyte 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think you're still misinterpreting them. It's harder to donate tokens than it is to donate books or a computer. Not all donations are cash. Though, in a sense, I am donating tokens. I run an LLM box at my apartment, and I let some people in my community have a free account through my hosted Open WebUI.

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infecto 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This feels like picking a random thing against LLMs to complain about. These tools are not even necessary today I am not sure why they would be necessary tomorrow beyond efficiency. If that day does come though, you would have to assume open source models would also be coming a long way.