Comment by cjfd
18 hours ago
The article talks about 'software development will be democratized' but the current LLM hype is quite the opposite. The LLMs are owned by large companies and are quite impossible to train by any individual, if only because of energy costs. The situation where I am typing my code on my linux machine is much more democratic.
Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect.
Democracy is about governance, not access.
A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
>Democracy is about governance, not access.
It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
With the consequence that disambiguation may be needed.
I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.
The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have.
(Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)
It is democratising from the perspective of non-programmers- they can now make their own tools.
What you say about big tech is true at same time though. I worry about what happens when China takes the lead and no longer feels the need to do open models. First hints already showing - advance access to ds4 only for Chinese hardware makers
Programming is probably the most democratized profession ever.
The problem was never access barriers, but the fact that people are too lazy to study even a 200-300 pages on something as simple as ruby on rails.
I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering.
It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all.
But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition.
A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.
They can rent their own tools, more like.
No, they can make their own tools. They rent someone else's tools in the process of making their own tools.
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Terrible argument. They always could learn and DIY.
You have to have a knack for it, most people are not programmer types
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... if they are privileged enough to be able to take time away from family and jobs.
The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this learning less expensive for those with little of both time and money. That's what's meant by democratised.
The people taking the lead in most of Ai in America are bootlickers of fascism. So not much difference than China on a long enough time line.
The US losing the plot doesn’t change the fact that the tech is fundamentally democraticism on a personal level.
If all the frontier models disappear into autocratic dark holes then yeah we have a problem but the fundamental freedom gain an “individuals can make tools without knowing coding” isn’t going anywhere
It's "democratizing" in the same way Uber "democratized" taxis...
Taxi became more accessible and reliable, didn't it
have you priced an Uber lately?
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That's a great point but you didn't make your linux machine yourself. A large tech corp made it, and each of its parts. Some of us could probably make their own computers but I don't think I'd be able to make one smaller than the house I live in. There's something to be said about large-scale automation and that's not that it "democratizes" anything. Like you say: quite the opposite.
You are assuming democracy wasn't designed to crush the individual and reduce autonomy at all cost. How cute.