> We need open weights companies now more than ever.

If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that they're bleeding money for something that most people don't seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.

Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and money would have been far better spent elsewhere.

There's plenty of valuable use cases for being able to give natural language instructions to a tool and have it act on that input. I do however agree that the current hype and valuations far exceed the real value being offered.

Like with the dot com bubble there will be a crash and then whatever shakes out of that will be the companies and products who invested in understanding the actual strengths and weaknesses of the tech, instead of just trying to slap an "AI" sticker on everything.