What about third world programmers? They can’t necessarily afford a $5000 GPU. If it weren’t for the “generosity” of tech companies like GitHub granting free LLM usage, they might be locked out entirely. This would put them at a disadvantage, we can argue to what degree but it’s still a disadvantage.

Depending on the curve we’re on, LLMs may grow more resource hungry while becoming closer to human performance in software engineering tasks. It’s not unimaginable this would concentrate productivity in the upper class of software engineers that can afford the hardware and/or licenses.