Comment by karmickoala
12 hours ago
Which one is more at risk of having the wipe-out and cost levers: your FOSS language/compiler or your paid third party LLM?
Sure, there are similarities, but while we're figuring out a FOSS solution that will run on your machine and we'll have access to more than the weights, the abstraction ladder isn't as equivalent as we think they are.
> Which one is more at risk of having the wipe-out and cost levers: your FOSS language/compiler or your paid third party LLM?
Neither is likely to go away. I do not expect it will ever be difficult to access an LLM in the forseeable future, barring massive legislation + enforcement to entirely ban them (I can run several capable coding models locally)
Nor is it likely that for developers at most companies will not have access to at least some LLM of comparably intelligence to those we have today (more advanced models may be restricted or too expensive) - right now large parts of the world economy are retooling to expand ai inference volume, not decrease it
This seems like "what if you don't have a calculator!" - and like with a calculator, there are benefits to learning things without the tool aid of course, n(including developing a sense for when things are wrong) but professionals are using the right tools for the job
Do you think its likely ?
How feasible is it to have a local, FOSS, encyclopedic LLM for question answering and basic help with common technical tasks? I feel like that would be enough for me.