Comment by lioeters

> black box AI

This is why, as much as I respect the underlying technology and its wondrous achievements, I will never accept proprietary "intelligence as a service" as a critical dependency in my workflow and business. LLM-assisted, sure. LLM-dependent? No way. If we can't run it on our own machines or build it from source code, even theoretically, then we are surrendering our agency and autonomy to work under someone else's control and power, subservient to their intelligence.

Have we learned nothing from the free software movement? At this point we're losing, or perhaps already lost, the war on general-purpose computing. How ironic that China is now the leader of releasing open-weight models, liberating and democratizing this technology at least partially so we can run them locally on our machines. Even then, it's not "open source" until we know how the sausage is made, all the ingredients. The source of training data and the entire process made transparent, so we can build it ourselves and know exactly what's inside the box.

Until we have open and transparent AI, we might as well be chanting shamanic incantations and praying to the gods for better programs.