On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?

Software development was already one of the most democratised professions on earth. With any old dirt cheap used computer, an internet connection, and enough drive and curiosity you could self-train yourself into a role that could quickly become a high paying job. While they certainly helped, you never needed any formal education or expensive qualifications to excel in this field. How is this better?

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Workaccount2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Open/local models are available.

Maybe not as good, but they can certainly do far far more than what was available a few years ago.

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bsder 3 days ago | parent [-]

The open models don't have access to all the proprietary code that the closed ones have trained on.

That's primarily why I finally had to suck it up and sign up for Claude. Claude clearly can cough up proprietary codebase examples that I otherwise have no access to.

	▲	simonw 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Given that very few of the "open models" disclose their training data there's no reason at all to assume that the proprietary models have an advantage in terms of training on proprietary data. As far as I can tell the reason OpenAI and Anthropic are ahead in code is that they've invested extremely heavily in figuring out the right reinforcement learning training mix needed to get great coding results. Some of the Chinese open models are already showing signs of catching up.

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simonw 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's better because now you can automate something tedious in your life with a computer without having to first climb a six month learning curve.

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biammer 3 days ago | parent [-]

> deergomoo: On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?

> simonw: It's better because now you can automate something tedious in your life with a computer without having to first climb a six month learning curve.

Completely ignores, or enthusiastically accepts and endorses, the consolidation of production, power, and wealth into a stark few (friends), and claims superiority and increased productivity without evidence?

This may be the most simonw comment I have ever seen.

	▲	simonw 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		At the tail end of 2023 I was deeply worried about consolidation of power, because OpenAI were the only lab with a GPT-4 class model and none of their competitions had produced anything that matched it in the ~8 months since it had launched. I'm not worried about that at all any more. There are dozens of organizations who have achieved that milestone now, and OpenAI aren't even definitively in the lead. A lot of those top-class models are open weight (mainly thanks to the Chinese labs) and available for people to run on their own hardware. I wrote a bunch more about this in my 2024 wrap-up: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-gpt-...