It's _relatively_ democratic when compared to these counterfactual gatekeeping scenarios:

- What if these centralized providers had restricted their LLMs to a small set of corporations / nations / qualified individuals?

- What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?

- What if the universities / corporations, who had worked on concepts like the attention mechanism so essential for Google's paper, had instead gatekept it to themselves?

- What if the base models, recipes, datasets, and frameworks for training our own LLMs had never been open-sourced and published by Meta/Alibaba/DeepSeek/Mistral/many more?

There are lots of open weight models

You're right! And cars when they were invented didn't give increased mobility to millions of people, because they came from just a few manufacturers.

Cell phones made communication easier for exactly zero people even though billions have been sold. Why? Because they come from just a few different companies.