Yes, it seems that way now.

The first one's free.

After you're hooked, and don't know how to think any more for yourself, and all the primary sources have folded, the deal will be altered.

If the entities democratizing access weren't companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars with a requirement to prioritize substantial returns for their investors, I'd agree with you!

This is temporary. AI models have their own Moore's law. Yes the mega corps will have the best models but soon enough what is currently SOTA will be open source and run on your own local machine if you want.

the mega corps are getting all of us and the investors to fund the RnD.

How? You don't know what the llm was trained on and don't know if it has any bias. Imo llms are a disaster for knowledge work because they act like a black box.

The internet already democratized access to knowledge. (Hosted) LLMs put that free knowledge behind a paywall. Taken by itself this seems fine —- how you access the knowledge (via internet or chat bot) is still up to you. However, the argument is that the knowledge producers aren’t incentivized to publish in a model where everything is fetched through agents. Couple that with closed weight models and you will (eventually) have overall worse access to less knowledge and higher personal cost.