Go ask 30 people off the street to set up LM studio and get it using tools to search the web (without web access local models are practically useless to the average person beyond summarizing and editing documents so internet access is a must).

Barriers to entry are a thing. Look at Linux or general open source adoption. Convenience is important.

This thread is about making reverse engineering/jailbreaking more accessible. The target audience for that will likely never be laymen. Even if barriers to entry are slightly elevated again, by making it slightly harder to get access to jailbreak-willing LLMs, ultimately the barrier will still be significantly lower than it was a few years ago.

Also, for each device/group of devices, this only has to be done by a single determined person. It's not something that _everyone_ has to be able to do to have a transformative effect.

But right now laymen have easy access to this stuff! That’s what’s amazing about it right? And it’s not like there are two categories in the world, laymen and experts. I am a great example of someone who falls in the middle. I have enough technological knowledge to get myself in trouble and hack away at projects, but I am in no way a coder or engineer. I am the kind of person that gets dropped from the pack when these things tighten up too much. I can survive hugging face not hosting this stuff, but a number of my peers probably would throw up their hands and move on. And I don’t blame them, it gets exhausting fighting every single service in our lives trying to make it work for us. We eventually have to pick and choose. I don’t have time to jailbreak and hack together everything in my life. That’s why I have an iPhone and a more locked down, controlled Linux computer.

"Go ask 30 people off the street to set up LM studio and get it using tools to search the web"

They won't need to do that. All they'll need to do is use one of the sites/services set up by folks like you and me, who can set up an LM studio.

They will go and pay OpenAI and be done with it

Not if OpenAI models refuse to do the thing they want done.

That’s when they turn to (extra) sketchy websites or just throw their hands up and give up.

I just feel like some of you are inadvertently advocating for “only the most determined should be allowed to participate.”

Yeah there's that. There's also, ask my nephew that fixes the printer.

As I said another comment, this all just feels like everyone inadvertently saying “only the most dedicated should be given direct access to these tools.” I wouldn’t be necessarily against that if the alternative wasn’t yet another privacy-violating subscription minefield dominating 99% of the landscape. That’s what that road leads to. Barriers -> Less participation -> less created outside the prescribed corporate play pen -> more people in the play pen.