Comment by Jenda_

> virtually none of this stuff is possible with technology any normal citizen has access to

So far, it looks like open-weight models are lagging less than a year behind frontier capabilities. And I think one year diffusion of technology from "insider lab demo" to widely available is actually pretty fast?

There are lots of research fields which "normal citizen" has no access to - medical and biological research, particle physics. Some of it is somehow publicly controlled (LHC), some of it not at all (commercial pharma research, mostly secret until the final human trials). And most of it reaches "normal citizens" in way more than a year.

(and I'm talking about open-weight models. The availability of commercial AI models from private preview to included-in-your-$100-subscription is currently like 4 months)