> deergomoo: On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?

> simonw: It's better because now you can automate something tedious in your life with a computer without having to first climb a six month learning curve.

Completely ignores, or enthusiastically accepts and endorses, the consolidation of production, power, and wealth into a stark few (friends), and claims superiority and increased productivity without evidence?

This may be the most simonw comment I have ever seen.

At the tail end of 2023 I was deeply worried about consolidation of power, because OpenAI were the only lab with a GPT-4 class model and none of their competitions had produced anything that matched it in the ~8 months since it had launched.

I'm not worried about that at all any more. There are dozens of organizations who have achieved that milestone now, and OpenAI aren't even definitively in the lead.

A lot of those top-class models are open weight (mainly thanks to the Chinese labs) and available for people to run on their own hardware.

I wrote a bunch more about this in my 2024 wrap-up: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-gpt-...