81–90 of 92 posts
Strongly disagree with the thesis. Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Regulatory capture is the only thing I’m scared of with regards to tooling options and cost.
From my recent experience with Qwen 3.5 I am less concerned about this. It certainly will never be “the best” but I did some TS refactoring with Qwen + Opencode over the weekend and it was surprisingly good. I even asked Opus 4.6 to grade the commits and it usually gave it a B- haha.. Anyway, it might be worth it to invest in an LLM rig today if you’re paranoid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of any high volume/consumer electronics/computer technology that has not been driven down in price over time. So based on historical precedent, I think your "greater than zero probability" might be only a tiny bit greater than zero.
xkcd did one about graphic calculators https://xkcd.com/768/ But other that comes to mind are MRI scanners, superconductors, quantum computers. I think in general this market law is subject to selection bias. The technology which does decrease in price will become commonplace and easy to find, whereas the technology which doesn’t risks becoming obscure and maybe even removed from consumer markets. EDIT: just to clari…
I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!
The one saving grace I see here is that open models are getting really good, and they're already profitable at an affordable price. So maybe it's true you won't get "the best", but I don't think you'll be that far off.
every time you see "open models" read: "binary blobs impossible to build locally temporarily not monetized"
I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!
Yet most people seem to agree that AI favours skilled dev more than unskilled ones...
I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!
Nonsensical word salad desperate to critique wealth.
> OpenAI reportedly discussed charging $20k/month on PhD-level research agents with investors. At this price point, it will be cheaper to hire a bunch of actual PhDs. The vast majority who will not earn anything close to 250k per year in most of the world.
Whether they can deliver is another question, but I wouldn’t bet my career that they can’t.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That just sounds like "controlling the means of production" with more clever wordplay.
Not really. The "means of production" in software has basically been free (other than the cost of a computer) for like 20+ years.
I predicted months ago that $20/month isn't going to fly anymore. I think if it produces code, it will jump to $1000/month at least. The value of the LLM nowadays is much higher than $1000/month and I think we will see that happen in 2026, because these companies need to make money ASAP in order to get more funding for the next round of training.