Comment by tkel
16 hours ago
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.)
Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services.
The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the opposite of democracy