> the choice is to live 2 years behind...

That's one world - there is another where the time gap grows a lot more as the compute and training requirements continue to rise.

Microsoft will probably be willing to spend multiple billions in compute to help train GPT5, so it depends how much investment open source projects can get to compete. Seems like it's down to Meta, but it depends if they can continue to justify releasing future models as Open Source considering the investment required, or what licensing looks like.

That's definitely what a lot of people think the choice is but learned helplessness is not the only option. It ignores the fact that for many many use cases small special-purpose models will perform as well as massive models. For most of your business use cases you don't need a model that can tell you a joke, write a poem, recommend a recipe involving a specific list of ingredients and also describe trig identities in the style of Eminem. You need specific performance for a specific set of user stories and a small model could well do that.

These small models are not expensive to train and are (crucially) much cheaper to run on an ongoing basis.

Opensource really is a viable choice.

> it reminds me of a choice like “do i host my website on a Windows Server, or a Linux box” at a time when both of these things are new.

Oof, you reminded me of when I chose to use Flow and then TypeScript won.

For individuals, this is a very short window of time where we have cheap access to an actually useful, and relatively unshackled SOTA model[0]. This is the rare time individuals can empower themselves, become briefly better at whatever it is they're doing, expand their skills, cut through tedium, let their creativity bloom. It's only a matter of time before many a corporation and startup parcel it all between themselves, enshittify the living shit out of AI, disenfranchise individuals again and sell them as services what they just took away.

No, it's exactly the individuals who can't afford to live "2 years behind". Benefits are too great, and worst that can happen is... going back to where one is now.

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[0] - I'm not talking the political bias and using the idea of alignment to give undue weigh to corporate reputation management issues. I'm talking about gutting the functionality to establish revenue channels. Like, imagine ChatGPT telling you it won't help you with your programming question, until you subscribe to Premium Dev Package for $language, or All Seasons Pass for all languages.

2 years behind in terms of timeline, but what factor in terms of productivity and quality of life?

Not to mention openai's lead compounds, so 2 years now and 4 years in 2025 may be 10 times the original prod/qol gain.

Marketing fluff is what 90% of tech is... it amazes me how many people think otherwise on hacker news. Unless you are building utility systems that run power plants, at the end of the day -- you're doing marketing fluff or the tools for it.

chatgpt will have an on prem solution eventually. in the mean time players like NVIDIA are working on that as well.

You can say that about anything, though. BigCorps aren't exactly known for adopting useful tech on a reasonable timeline, let alone at all. I don't think anyone is under the impression that orgs who refuse to migrate off of Java 5 will be looking at OpenAI for anything.

How do you know? Has someone created a set of test questions that can definitively prove it one way or another?

The original purpose of copyright was to promote progress, and now it seems to hinder it.

I'd love to see a language model that was only trained on public domain and openly available content. It would probably be way too little data to give it ChatGPT-like generality, but even a GPT-2 scale model would be interesting.

Intellectual property rights will yet turn out to be one of the Great Filters.