The difficulty of forking and modifying an open-source project has been drastically lowered so I predict we'll see more projects than ever before. But many of them will essentially be duplicates of each other.
I have many such forks myself. Some are totally different from upstream now, and yet improvements that upstream makes are straightforwardly portable. I just point Opus 5.5 at the repo; describe what I want; et voila.
In the past, communities were required to produce the rest of these things. Now we live in an era of unprecedented free software. Soon no one will even be able to lock us out of firmware and all software will be free as in free speech to all.
My expectation is that those AI primary forks will degenerate quickly. Maintaining OS requires a lot of judgement, direction, agents tend to turn softeare into big pile of disconnected features.
> - Any (super)intelligence caches work
> - Any (super)intelligence _wants to create stable abstractions_
This is a higher-order rephrasing of the "intelligence is compression" argument.
- Any (super)intelligence _wants to create stable abstractions_. Now this is a claim, not a fact. but I'd say this it's pretty clear. I can cache all of the work in the world, and maybe even re-use some of it, but that's different from the synthesis of creating an _abstraction_.
- Abstractions are lossy. They can lose a posteroi, in that they don't match the contract as specified. They can lose a priori - the specific set of problems and solutions they claimed was their goal and role, are wrong for whatever reason (discovered, the world and requirements changed, etc). Someone or something needs to maintain it now.
What's at the end of the tunnel. Is it reasonable to say that a few labs will carve up ownership of all the open source projects of the world? Or will there be more community lead projects than ever? There are also some nastier routes, such as making things so coupled and "holistic" that you can't use anything else besides a few products.