this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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You are betting on massive corporations having a change of heart and putting all their resources at the disposition of the public, for essentially free. Otherwise, AI will never be affordable in the sense that everyone could have free access to models that matter.
And I know that you said that self hosting is a possibility. But let’s be real here: public weight models are available because they pose no risk to the bottom line of the companies training them. There are zero competitive models trained by a non profit. But even if that wasn’t true, the current DRAM shortage is proof that these companies will never allow anyone to match them. Same goes for electricity and water.
Honestly, after all these years of witnessing big tech shitting all over us, I cannot understand where all these hopes come from. Would be endearing if it wasn’t so reckless.
I'm just showing that as technology progresses and scales it generally becomes cheaper and peoples access increases, again were literally on the internet now and have phones in our pockets that can do it, whereas 40 years ago PCs were much more expensive and internet was slow as hell.
We shouldn't trust big tech, I'm on Lemmy so that should be a bit of a given lol.
Even if LLMs were free to download and use, who is going to subsidize training and fine tuning, when it takes hundreds of millions of dollars? Also, LLMs are software, not hardware. If there's anything that we know about software is that it doesn't become faster with time, quite the opposite.
The thing I don't understand is that people believe the BS when all this is out there in the clear. Massive corporations open source models that pose no risk to their bottom line, then they spend millions of dollars to market their newest and latest, rinse and repeat, all fuelled by debt. Thus, self hosting will never catch up, and when the money dries up, there will be zero incentive to make more advanced models more affordable. In fact, since most of the time model improvements scale following training and hardware expenditure, they will become more expensive.
Is it though?
Like here you are, telling me that an example of "technology progress" is that "were literally on the internet now and have phones in our pockets that can do it, whereas 40 years ago PCs were much more expensive and internet was slow as hell", when the phone market is effectively controlled by two companies, Apple and Google. Now imagine the same landscape with LLMs.
I think the reality is open source and normal people are who continuously push progress forward, how much of the internet scaffolding is literally on the backs of open source projects?
A shit load.
LLMs are no different, and I can't agree with you that open source models are not a threat to the big players.
I'm not sure why you're downplaying what I'm saying about extending access and lowering prices, yes of course corporations don't do it out of the goodness of their capitalist hearts, but history shows that it does in fact reduce in cost over time, which was your initial point. "Oh must be nice for you that you can afford $20 a month and have your own homelab to self host models."
I grew up lower middle class, my home was repossesed by the bank during the housing crisis and my parents divorced.
I moved out at 18 and joined the workforce and have managed to get a middle-class wage via my efforts and a bit of luck. I hate my job and the morons in charge but the job market is shit.
I love open source software and the ideas beyond knowledge and work should be shared with others so we can all benefit (which is unfortunately not how this capitalist system works) and yet we have Linux, we have an amazing amount of open source projects that people do simply because they want to. Those are the people we should support and the ones who freely train and fine tune open source models.
To your point about "software doesn't become faster with time" mother fucker I remember windows 95, you're delusional if you don't think we've come an insane amount. I remember webpages taking minutes to load, interlacing vs non to help with image loading.
In the realm of LLMs, the software itself on the open source side has improved leaps and bounds in just the past 6 months on my same hardware.
I understand your negativity, it's hard not to fall into it when the world is how it is right now and things feel like (and are) getting worse in most ways.
Phones require specialized hardware and designing, to run and produce, LLMs only require normal consumer grade hardware and the desire to learn how to make it work. Will it ever be mainstream? Based on Linux vs Windows/Mac, probably not, but that doesn't mean it's pointless or impossible.