Which are those open ones? And how are they going to get their billions of dollars worth of investment back? Even Google Maps used to be virtually free until it wasn’t, at a fraction of the investment cost.

For starters: Qwen, GLM, Kimi, Llama.

How they run their business is none of my business. I can download the weights right now and use them as I see fit under the open source license terms.

Google Maps was never a self contained binary you could download. But even now it remains free to use.

I’m only familiar with Llama, but as far as I understood it’s in no way at the same level as Claude or Gemini, so in fact you’d still be a lot less productive compared to those using those products directly.

That’s the thing, us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users, but I do agree that that has been changing as of late.

They are not the same level, but that may be fine. As for productivity, I don't take that as a given. Maybe in a few years we'll be at the point where AI is better than AI + human, but we aren't there yet. The other models may be faster are pumping out code, but if you're building in the wrong direction more code is more bad.

> us as programmers are supposed to be creators/makers, not mere consumers/users

But that's a false dichotomy. As a programmer I am very much a consumer of the language I use, the IDE, the compiler, and of most of my dependencies. (to say nothing of the OS and the hardware).

I, and I'd wager most people around here, haven't and are aren't individually building at all layers of that stack at once.