alt Hacker News> It's really easy to switch between models. The different models have some differences that you notice over time but the techniques you learn in one place aren't going to lock you into a provider anywhere.
We have two cell phone providers. Google is removing the ability to install binaries, and the other one has never allowed freedom. All computing is taxed, defaults are set to the incumbent monopolies. Searching, even for trademarks, is a forced bidding war. Businesses have to shed customer relationships, get poached on brand relationships, and jump through hoops week after week. The FTC/DOJ do nothing, and the EU hasn't done much either.
I can't even imagine what this will be like for engineering once this becomes necessary to do our jobs. We've been spoiled by not needing many tools - other industries, like medical or industrial research, tie their employment to a physical location and set of expensive industrial tools. You lose your job, you have to physically move - possibly to another state.
What happens when Anthropic and OpenAI ban you? Or decide to only sell to industry?
This is just the start - we're going to become more dependent upon these tools to the point we're serfs. We might have two choices, and that's demonstrably (with the current incumbency) not a good world.
Computing is quickly becoming a non-local phenomenon. Google and the platforms broke the dream of the open web. We're about to witness the death of the personal computer if we don't do anything about it.
I just don’t see it.
I mean, the long arch of computing history has had us wobble back and forth in regards to how closed down it all was, but it seems we are almost at a golden age again with respect to good enough (if not popular) hardware.
On the software front, we definitely swung back from the age of Microsoft. Sure, Linux is a lot more corporate than people admit, but it’s a lot more open than Microsoft’s offerings and it’s capable of running on practically everything except the smallest IOT device.
As for LLMs. I know people have hyped themselves up to think that if you aren’t chasing the latest LLM release and running swarms of agents, you are next in the queues for the soup kitchens, but again, I don’t see why it HAS to play out that way, partly because of history (as referenced), partly because open models are already so impressive and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t continue to do well.
In fact, I do my day-to-day work using an open weight model. Beyond that, can only say I know employers who will probably never countenance using commercially hosted LLMs, but who are already setting up self-hosted ones based on open weight releases.