Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...
I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.
If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.
You can have a great LLM model with vast coding knowledge running on your computer right now, for free. It won't be the best one nor the fastest one, but still a very good one.
"Few individuals" get money mostly for providing LLMs as a service. As far as tech businesses go, this is refreshingly straightforward, literally just charging money for providing some useful service to people. Few tech companies have anything close to a honest business model like this.
I am unsure about the openness of the training data itself. That too should be required for a LLM to be considered 'open'.
Open source is the only way forward, I agree.