It makes me sad that devs start relying on proprietary online services to be able to work. We have been lucky enough to have FOSS tools to do everything and not to have to rely on any specific service or company to work and some of us are deciding to become like Monsanto-addicted farmers who forgot how to do their jobs without something they have to pay every month.
I remember being beholden to commercial (cough, pirated, cough) compilers and assemblers back in the day. FOSS is awesome but often lags because capital sees a chance to make money and can move faster.
It will change. There will be FOSS models, once it no longer takes hundreds of millions of dollars to train them.
Do you mind sharing what industry you’re in where you can fully rely on FOSS? In my industry we’re dependent on MATLAB, Xilinx tools, closed source embedded software and more. To name a few industries: game devs might be stuck with unity, finance quant devs might be stuck with Bloomberg terminals, iOS app devs are stuck with apple’s tooling etc… this isn’t just an LLM problem IMO.
The very recent agentic open weights models seem to be shaping up, so if all fails you can host one of these yourself (if you have the vram) or host it yourself somewhere.
