Tell HN: GPT-4 is not like Linux
I have learned Linux, C++, awk, TCP/IP, and countless of top-notch software in the past: all I needed was a computer and perhaps internet connection. I’m still learning this way. There’s so much high-quality stuff out there for free. I’m very grateful for that.
Now, when it comes to top-notch LLMs like GPT-4/Copilot, it seems like I need to ask for permission to use it. I need to register myself in their website, give away my email and phone number, and pay in order to use their API. This feels terrible awful. I cannot play around with GPT-4 on my own computer for free. Perhaps in a few years we’ll get powerful enough models to be able to run just fine in normal laptops (but by that time I imagine commercial models will be orders of magnitude more powerful as well… so what’s the point).
I just cannot share the enthusiasm many folks here have about GPT-4 and similars. Imagine today is 1991 and some amazing unix-like operating system has appeared: in order to use it and learn it, you just have to pay $0.0000001 per command line executed. No free alternative exists (at least not one that is that good). Imagine growing in that alternate universe and being a programmer. Imagine you have to pay for every line of code you write in your free time.
Do we really want to promote OpenAI? I don’t want to live in a reality in which I have to pay for every program I write on my free time (I’m assuming here that in a few years, OpenAI will be as ubiquitous as Linux is right now).