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?

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

I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before "Attention is all you need" paper, the novel thing they did was combining existing knowhow into a new idea and making it public. A couple of ingredients of the base research for this is decades old (interestingly back then some European universities were leading the field)

> I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before

I am not trying to be dismissive, but this could apply to all research ever

thats true! I meant "not somewhen accidentally in the future" but more of "relative close together on the timeline"

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.

Cars are a great analogy because they made mobility significantly worse for people who can’t afford them or refuse to use them for ethical reasons.

And cars now have become privacy nightmares, which we are now beholden to

I will tell that to the billions of people who are walking and biking around at this very moment. Just give me some time.

I said worse, not impossible. Because of cars, I have to take longer routes and put myself into danger while working.

Those people are the exception that proves the rule.

cars, up to relatively recently, have been pure hardware machines that when a consumer buys, they can own. Now that's starting to change. Let's see how "democratized" cars are when the manufacturers can hard-lock "owners" from them.

Similar story to cell phones.

LLMs are in this state right out the gate.