Difference is you are not a trillion dollar plus technology hyped as a harbinger of civilisational change.
931 karma · joined November 22, 2024
That's assuming the infrastructure needed to develop models stays available financially and supply wise. A lot of the services used to train and develop models are supplied and funded by people who are looking for multiple returns of investment. If/when OpenAI and Anthropic valuations fall and they inevitably get acquired, will Meta/Alphabet/Microsoft still want to spend lots of money for unclear returns in the short-term? Nvidia and co are on a one way train service to hype town. I don't think they will be happy to get on a coach to hype town Temu version. The shareholders likely won't.
Also, the backlash against LLMs is growing rapidly. AI content, data centres, etc is quickly gaining negative connotations outside of visual and music artists circles. While existing models are going nowhere, developing more advanced models is very quickly getting unpopular. LLMs Data centres increasing people's bills, Anthropic destroying old books, chat bots giving unethical advice to vulnerable people, etc. It won't be long before LLM infrastructure becoming an electoral issue.
Will a small research oriented community be big enough justify maintaining the apparatus needed to produce infra tech at a profitable level post OpenAI?
That is why you must think carefully who you vouch for. Like in a house party. If you bring someone who does not act well, it reflects bad on you.
Ultimately, a shrinking contributor pool is the inevitable consequence of code generation being virtually free.
On top of this, you would want an expirable proof of humanity to reduce account takeover as a security vector and publicly sharing failed proof attempts would quickly deter actors from targeting projects en masse.
If pleasing that minority doesn't help Firefox gain more users (looking at the numers, it sure hasn't), then what's the point of having core supporters and evangelists at the cost of your existence? Would you rather have a Chrome only existence where you are forced to have EME on and no adblock just because you don't want Firefox to do something you morally disapprove of?
Lose the users lose the funding. Firefox can't live out of HN as its sole userbase. Have you checked how much it costs to build and maintain a modern browser?
Plenty of users who have no money for TV or consoles, watch it on their laptop on low quality. I am one of those who watches Netflix on Linux Firefox :)
This isn't just any risk. It's an existential one for Firefox. You are asking them to make something that would be unpopular to the majority of its userbase at a point when they are borderline extinct. You are asking Mozilla to jeopardise Firefox for the same of a feature that YOU dislike enough to want to burn Firefox to the ground to get rid of it.
Most people are laypeople who have no idea what's on the other side of their fave chatbot page. As far as laypeople are concerned, AI has always been a talking machine. The literature and filmography has reinforced this idea. So as soon as a talking machine emerged, people applied those fictional concepts onto reality.
Tech people should have known better than to jump on this bandwagon.
That's assuming a user with no ad-blocker which is an ever diminishing number of users
It depends on the economics and usefulness of the tool. Google Search got away with it because it was useful AND trading zero cost of usage for ads was worth it for most.
Whether LLMs can get away with it seems very unclear now as they don't seem as popular as search engines.
The question is, will you want to run a model comparable to today's (meaning 2026) SOTA in 2028? Humans always want the latest shiny LLM model.
That's the only way I can see frontier labs charging high enough to sustain the cash flow needed to operate as racing to the bottom is not possible for them.
It is interesting to think whether this is another "Cambrian" era like the smartphone OSes when you had Symbian, Android, iOs, Windows Mobile and so many others competing.
It's like asking tobacco companies to reduce the toxicity and addiction of their products, inevitable collapse.
The reality is that the business model itself is inherently toxic.
Linux has been usable for non proprietary software for decades now. The fact that people are refusing to jump ship even when Windows actively undermines them and itself speaks volumes of people's aversion (or inability) to switch OSes.
Most people don't have cars
There is a difference between trying something and performing a test whose results are meant to be representative of most setups. A lot of people (in tech surprisingly) who see themselves as practitioners of applied science, apply flawed methodologies and try to generalise the results.
Just because testing is fast, it does not mean that it is free or cheap. Plus time is money and verifying every LLM setup every koolaid dev is proclaiming on bluesky could easily be a full time job.
This isn't a technological problem but a human one. The fundamental problem is that we haven't developed generalisable, scalable and profitable business models on the internet that aren't toxic.