I can see a completely different kind of future where local models that run on commodity software get good enough for what most people need to do. At that point we'd be in a world that Stallman envisioned with every user having full control over what's running on their machine, and being able to build whatever features they want. We already see how it's becoming trivial to reverse engineer complex apps like Photoshop, or to crack PS5 games using LLMs. We are likely end up in a world where closed source is dead because code itself no longer has any value because anybody can copy and reproduce any application trivially.

And we are already starting to get there. Qwen 3.8 27b is comparable in terms of capability to Opus 4.6 which was a frontier model just half a year ago. If Qwen 4 gets to about Opus 5.5 level sometime next year, that's going to be good enough for making vast majority of software that people need. After that it's just a matter of further optimization or hardware getting better so it can run on most computers. But just to reiterate, it's already running on consumer grade hardware, and it can do real work today.

The tech bros have insane GPU lease agreements. More than they can reasonably afford/use. When "amateurs" can recreate photoshop, 1000x "free" (would be wasted) compute at a better photoshop they control is something they can do too, and beat OSS and adobe. There are capable decompiler to readable/organized source code agents now too. At one point, the LLM labs can stop releasing new models, and just steal everything themselves.

People are not "suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property". Instead they wonder why some companies can violate those rules on an unprecedented scale whiteout consequences.

I think it's more about the unequal application if those laws. People have had their lives ruined for sharing an mp3. These companies infringe on literally everything and they get rich.

I bet the next step is that the folks vibe coding emulators and replacements for major software suites are going to get serious fines, while artists are going to continue to get ripped off in the name of "innovation".

Well i think the issue is if licenses become worthless then that's also bad for the GPL

Exactly. What happened to "restriction of what a user can do with software or its source code is an infringement upon the users' rights"? I'm not saying that AI companies are acting in the spirit of FOSS, they're not, their models aren't even open-weight (for the most part), but the issue is not the training on materials that ought to be public domain anyway. There's plenty of ethical issues with modern technology. It's not sustainable at all, the supply chain is full of slavery, it generates huge amounts of emissions, etc. People's primary concern being pearl clutching about "plagiarism" shows where their priorities lie. If AI companies have plagiarised then I couldn't care less. It's everything else they're doing that's the problem.

is there a difference in the environmental destruction when used this way? no? these things have so many negative effects on the world in so many areas that making life more convenient for coddled computer touches doesn’t excuse literally any of it

LLM companies will legitimize their shit by saying "look, Linus is using our model to make Linux better".

I can absolutely understand some of the objections and I understand why writers and artists are pissed. My code has always been free software so I don't object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.

The power usage is definitely a concern but that holds up for all computing. I don't see people up in arms about inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!