I think the reality is open source and normal people are who continuously push progress forward, how much of the internet scaffolding is literally on the backs of open source projects?

A shit load.

LLMs are no different, and I can't agree with you that open source models are not a threat to the big players.

I'm not sure why you're downplaying what I'm saying about extending access and lowering prices, yes of course corporations don't do it out of the goodness of their capitalist hearts, but history shows that it does in fact reduce in cost over time, which was your initial point. "Oh must be nice for you that you can afford $20 a month and have your own homelab to self host models."

I grew up lower middle class, my home was repossesed by the bank during the housing crisis and my parents divorced.

I moved out at 18 and joined the workforce and have managed to get a middle-class wage via my efforts and a bit of luck. I hate my job and the morons in charge but the job market is shit.

I love open source software and the ideas beyond knowledge and work should be shared with others so we can all benefit (which is unfortunately not how this capitalist system works) and yet we have Linux, we have an amazing amount of open source projects that people do simply because they want to. Those are the people we should support and the ones who freely train and fine tune open source models.

To your point about "software doesn't become faster with time" mother fucker I remember windows 95, you're delusional if you don't think we've come an insane amount. I remember webpages taking minutes to load, interlacing vs non to help with image loading.

In the realm of LLMs, the software itself on the open source side has improved leaps and bounds in just the past 6 months on my same hardware.

I understand your negativity, it's hard not to fall into it when the world is how it is right now and things feel like (and are) getting worse in most ways.

Phones require specialized hardware and designing, to run and produce, LLMs only require normal consumer grade hardware and the desire to learn how to make it work. Will it ever be mainstream? Based on Linux vs Windows/Mac, probably not, but that doesn't mean it's pointless or impossible.