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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Democratizing coding so regular people can get the most out of computers is the opposite of oppression. You are mistaking your interests for societies interests.

It's the same with artists who are now pissed that regular people can manifest their artistic ideas without needing to go through an artist or spend years studying the craft. The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.

It's incredibly ironic how socializing what was a privatized ability has otherwise "socialist" people completely losing their shit. Just the mask of pure virtue slipping...

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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-...

I used claude code to set up a bunch of basic tools my wife was using in her daily work. Things like custom pomodoro timers, task managers, todo notes.

She used to log into 3 different websites. Now she just opens localhost:3000 and has all of them on the same page. No emails shared with anyone. All data stored locally.

I could have done this earlier but the time commitment with Claude Code now was writing a spec in 5-minutes and pressing approve a few times vs half a day.

I count this as an absolute win. No privacy breaches, no data sharing.

> The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.

Tt's because these companies profit from all the existing art without compensating the artists. Even worse, they are now putting the very people out of a job who (unwittingly) helped to create these tools in the first place. Not to mention how hurtful it must be for artists seeing their personal style imitated by a machine without their consent.

I totally see how it can empower regular people, but it also empowers the megacorps and bad actors. The jury is still out on whether AI is providing a net positive to society. Until then, let's not ignore the injustice and harm that went into creating these tools and the potential and real dangers that come with it.

When you imagine my position, "I hate these companies for democratizing code/art", then debate that it is called a strawman logical fallacy.

Ascribing the goals of "democratize code/art" onto these companies and their products is called delusion.

I am sure the 3 letter agency directors on these company boards are thrilled you think they left their lifelong careers solely to finally realize their dream to allow you to code and "manifest your artistic ideas".

Again, open models exist. These companies don't have a monopoly on the tech and they know it.

So maybe celebrate open/private/local models for empowering people rather than selfishly complain about it?

Yes, but the quality of output from open/local models isn't anywhere close to what you get from Claude or Gemini. You need serious hardware to get anything approaching decent processing speeds or even middling quality.

It's more economical for the average person to spend $20/month on a subscription than it is for them to drop multiple thousands $ and untold hours of time experimenting. Local AI is a fun hobby though.

But people are not creating anything. They are just asking a computer to remix what other people created.

It's incredibly ironic how blatant theft has left otherwise capitalistic people so enthusiastic.

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