I'm not sure if it's just me getting older or what, but something strikes me as odd about the future of programming and software engineering: LLMs are impressive, but you have to pay to use them. I can't recall another core tool or technology in the software industry—something central not just to the field, but to the world—that isn't free or open source. Think TCP/IP, the Linux kernel, Postgres, Git, ffmpeg, qemu, Latex, Kubernetes, and so on. Sure, there's plenty of proprietary software out there, but it's not the backbone of the internet or the computing industry.
Now, LLMs have the potential to become part of that backbone, yet nobody seems particularly concerned that they’re not open source (I'm talking about GPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini). I know there are open source alternatives, but they’re not nearly as capable—and it seems most people here are perfectly fine using and paying for the proprietary ones.
I don’t like a future where I have to pay for every token just to write a program. And don’t tell me, "Well, just don’t use LLMs"; they’re going to become what Linux is today: ubiquitous.
There was a time back in the years after dot com era where search servers were sold with the proprietary software loaded for enterprises to use. A google box running on your local network. Now there are advanced things like elastic and other search specific technologies that you can use.
I think LLMs might follow this market pattern where you can buy something to host yourself and then commoditization happens enough where open source solutions will also evolve to have good enough solutions.
An idea for a disrupting company would be to open source their LLM and offer support and feature development to enterprises as the paid offering, kinda like Red Hat or others doing that model. A key difference is running an LLM locally on decent sized compute is fine but it will be costly to scale on your own.
> I know there are open source alternatives, but they’re not nearly as capable
They certainly are capable (DeepSeek being the obvious example), the problem is that they're still too expensive to run and there's no currently differentiator to compete with the big players who are likely selling inference at a loss.
Windows has been the backbone of desktop computing for decades, and it certainly isn't free. People relying on open-source software seems to be a relatively new phenomenon, starting in the early-2000s.
For what it's worth, I absolutely share your concerns around the fact that LLM models are now proprietary. I want to see more open-source (or at least open-weight) models being built
You're in a bit of an echo chamber, I believe. The concern is real and valid. It just doesn't get spammed to death nearly as much as embracing narratives.
You can host Llama if you are concerned about this. If you have something so valuable you will not give it for free to everyone.
I don't think that's the solution. Proprietary LLMs will just keep growing, and it doesn't seem like the open source alternatives are gaining much traction. I guess it's because you need a lot of money to train high-quality LLMs (tons of energy, maybe?). Besides, as stated in the title of this post, us, as software engineers, the collective, don't seem to mind much the current state of things as far as I can tell.
> Proprietary LLMs will just keep growing
Strictly speaking - we don't really know if this is true. There is no study proving AI gets smarter up to a certain point. It might keep scaling forever, or one day we might unknowingly reach the soft limit of LLM intelligence. I think assertions like the one you're making require specific evidence.
For comparison's sake, proprietary models like GPT-3 now pale in comparison to the results you get from a 7b Open Source LLM. The Open Source stuff really does move along, if not at the pace everyone would prefer.
Llama is also proprietary and not open source.
The "open source means open training pipeline" issue is not relevant to the OP's question.
You don't have to use LLMs, of course, and when you want help coding, LLMs are vastly cheaper than human programmers.
I see LLMs as a faster stackoverflow rather than a cheaper human
The state of LLMs right now seems analogous to the state of CAD software. There are free options available but they aren't as capable. The good part about this analogy is that the needs of the users aren't very dynamic -- if you are using a CAD software it is for design tasks. The interface may change, but the purpose doesn't. Because of this, the quality gap between free CAD packages and
LLMs are natural language models (what words are likely to come next given the context), not any sort of AGI. For that purpose, the gap between open and closed models is closing much faster in LLMs than CAD. I think LLMs will go the way of chess engines -- one of these models will become the Stockfish of LLMs and the proprietary models will end up being a waste of money and resources.