I must say I find this idea, and this wording, elitist in a negative way.
I don't see any fundamental problem with democratization of abilities and removal of gatekeeping.
Chances are, you were able to accumulate your expert knowledge only because:
- book writing and authorship was democratized away from the church and academia
- web content publication and production were democratized away from academia and corporations
- OSes/software/software libraries were all democratized away from corporations through open-source projects
- computer hardware was democratized away from corporations and universities
Each of the above must have cost some gatekeepers some revenue and opportunities. You were not really an idiot just because you benefited from any of them. Analogously, when someone else benefits at some cost to you, that doesn't make them an idiot either.
It would be like if you put in all this time to get fit and skilled on mountain bikes and there was a whole community of people, quiet nature, yada yada, and then suddenly they just changed the rules and anyone with a dirt bike could go on the same trails.
It's double damage for anyone who isn't close to retirement and built their career and invested time (i.e. opportunity cost) into something that might become a lot less valuable and then they are fearful for future economic issues.
I enjoy using LLMs and have stopped writing code, but I also don't pretend that change isn't painful.
However, our personal emotions need not turn into disparaging others' use of the same skills for their satisfaction / welfare / security.
Additionally, our personal emotions need not color the objective analysis of a social phenomenon.
Those two principles are the rationales behind my reply.
I suppose I see "any idiot" as a more general phrase, like "idiot proof", not directly meaning that anyone who uses a LLM is an idiot. However I can also see how it would be seen as disparaging.
Also, while there's a lot of examples of people entrenching into a certain behavior or status and causing problems, I also think society is a bit harsh on people who struggle with change. For people who are less predisposed to be ok with change feels like a lot of the time the response is "just deal with it and don't be selfish, this new XYZ is better for society overall".
Society is pretty much made up of personal emotions on some level. I don't think we should go around attacking people, but very few things can be considered truly objective in the world of societal analysis.
This parroted argument is getting really tired. It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.
LLMs aren’t “democratising” anything. There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.
There are loads of high performance open source LLMs on the market that compete with the big 3. I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration since the open-source boom 20 years ago.
The issue arises from it not being that person’s opinion but a talking point. People didn’t all individually arrive at this “democratisation” argument by themselves, they were sold what to say by the big players with vested interest in succeeding.
I’m very much for discussing thoughts one has come up with themselves, especially if they disagree with mine. But what is not productive is arguing with a proxy.
> I have not seen this level of community engagement and collaboration
Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
> Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.
Your comments seem pretty aggressive for what you’re replying to. Maybe take a beat to assess your biases? I thought the main comment was pretty fair and sensible, yet somehow you landed on calling them a spammer/bad submitter/astroturfer/non-thinker. Maybe they are? I could be wrong, but that's quite a strong reaction for what they asserted at face value. Not really trying to police anything here, I just thought the initial comment had merit and this devolved quite quickly.
Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce useful programs. That's it.
It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what the technology enables, and it's a simple enough observation that millions of people can independently arrive at that conclusion, and some of them might even refer to it as "democratization".
This is a good thing. It's a filter for the careless, lazy, and incompetent. LLMs are to programming what a microwave is to food. I'm not a chef because I can nuke a hot pocket. "Vibe coders" (not AI-assisted coding) are the programming equivalent of the people on Kitchen Nightmares. Go figure, it's a community rife with narcissism, too.
It is what we are talking about, hence not "counterproductive".
They absolutely are. Anytime new knowledge or skills become widely available to everyone, that's a term used for it.
> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
None of that has anything to do with anything. There's competition between companies to keep prices low and accessibility high.
I think you are simply misunderstanding the word "democratic". It isn't just political. From MW:
> 3 : relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people
Here, it's specifically about making things available to the broad masses of the people that wasn't before.
This isn't a matter of opinion. It's just the meaning of the word.
There was no tool that could easily whip up a 300 line script to do something for me when I didn't know how to code, and do it in just seconds.
The topic here is the democratization of a whole set of new abilities. Not just knowledge.
....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort.
LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.
That would not happen, simply because those companies' interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play out.
And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search is well and alive.
> You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.
We have way more free resources at the moment. Name anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of surfacing that resource.
> This parroted argument
Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased) if it's against your own beliefs.
Everyone already had the option to write any code, fork any open source project, publish any of their code, run any of their code but suddenly AI appears and THAT is what makes it democratic? What was undemocratic about it? Is this democracy where idiots are running ai agents that publish smear campaigns, or harass maintainers for not accepting their slop is the democratic future you wish for?
How many (job) positions do you see today that want a backend developer? Frontend developer? Not much because now everyone is expected to be at least full stack, if not also devops as well. The exact same thing is playing out right now with AI, people are expected to produce 5x the amount of code before, if you don't, someone else will take your job that is willing to do it.
Already bloated programs will bloat further, they will require even more resources to run, you will have to pay even more for hardware, they will be slower, less responsive, you will have to pay yet another monthly fee to big tech for their AIs, and people will happily do it and pat themselves that we democratized programming, while running towards the future where nobody will be able to own hardware capable of general computing.
Why blame big tech when they're just providing a service at a fair cost (3rd party inference is incredibly cheap)? I'm not sure how that makes sense.
LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc.
How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever.
(I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).
> when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models.
You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.
It was very democratized before, almost anyone could pick up a book or learn these skills on the internet.
Opportunity was democratized for a very long time, all that was needed was the desire to put in the work.
OP sounds frustrated but at the same time the societal promise that was working for longest time (spend personal time specializing and be rewarded) has been broken so I can understand that frustration..
/s, obviously I would hope except I've actually seen this sentiment expressed seriously.
They are not obese because they cannot afford the necessary amounts of protein and calories from healthy sources in the grocery store.
If you eschew those highs and settle for some sprouted moong bean salad with a little bit of salt/lime/black pepper, or hummus and veggies, or eggs with some smashed avocado on toast, tofu and some broccoli, etc, then it does not cost much time.
There is no baking involved, just cutting, mixing, blending, and maybe soaking. Sautéing or pan frying in a little bit of olive oil or canola oil is also quick.
There is a range of food processing going from raw vegetables to hyper-processed fast food.
Most people fall in the middle and expect their food to be boiled, baked, fried, etc. They will most likely not want to eat just salad 24/7.
And once you start boiling/baking/frying, you're adding a lot more processing time just for the food itself, let alone cleaning everything afterwards.
Plus people want varied diets so they need a wide range of different tasting foods, most like 10-20.
Cooking well is really hard and very time consuming (and potentially costly!) to learn.
Healthy living enthusiasts as well as cooking enthusiasts (sometimes the same group, many times different groups) REALLY love to minimize this aspect.
>Most people fall in the middle and expect their food to be boiled, baked, fried, etc. They will most likely not want to eat just salad 24/7.
> Plus people want varied diets so they need a wide range of different tasting foods, most like 10-20.
Right, so the problem is people want to eat unhealthy foods. The problem is not lack of money or time.
Did you actually read the 2 paragraphs you quoted?
It does not. Legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and yogurt have always been cheaper than processed food.
People prefer eating carbohydrates and saturated fats.
It doesn’t.
It doesn't. Carbs like rice, potatoes, etc. are incredibly cheap. Protein like ground beef and basic cuts of chicken are not expensive. And broccoli, carrots, green peppers, apples -- these are not exactly breaking the bank. Product is seasonal, so you vary what you buy according to what is cheapest this week.
Meanwhile, stuff like breakfast cereal and potato chips and Oreo cookies actually are surprisingly expensive.
Eating too many carbs is not a healthy diet dude
is there price to be paid for getting any desired result imaginable without effort on a press of a button?
So it's not just software that's coming to an end, everything else is as well. But; billionaires wives will still need haircuts (women billionaires will also need haircuts), so hairdresser will be the last profession.
That said, if we zoom out and review such paradigm shifts over history, we find that they usually result in some new social contracts and value systems.
Both good expert writers and poor novice writers have been able to publish non-fiction books from a few centuries now. But society still doesn't perceive them as the same at all. A value system is still prevalent and estimated primarily from the writing itself. This is regardless of any other qualifications/disqualifications of authors based on education / experience / nationality / profession etc.
At the individual level too, just because book publishing is easy doesn't mean most people want to spend their time doing that. After some initial excitement, people will go do whatever are their main interests. Some may integrate these democratized skills into their main interests.
In my opinion, this historical pattern will turn out to be true with the superdrug as well as vibe coding.
Some new value will be seen in the swimming or running itself - maybe technique or additional training over and above the drug's benefits.
Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.
It's a nice idea, but I feel like that's only going to be the case for very small companies or open source projects. Or places that pride themselves on not using AI. Artisan code I call it.
At my company the prevailing thought is that code will only be written by AI in the future. Even if today that's not the case, they feel it's inevitable. I'm skeptical of this given the performance of AI currently. But their main point is, if the code solves the business requirements, passes tests and performs at an adequate level, it's as good as any hand written code. So the value of readable, succinct, novel code is completely lost on them. And I fear this will be the case all over the tech sector.
I'm hopeful for a bit of an anti-AI movement where people do value human created things more than AI created things. I'll never buy AI art, music, TV or film.
But I do agree, if everyone can build software then the allure of it along with the value will be lost. Vibe coding is only a superpower as long as you're one of the select few doing it. Although I imagine it will continue to become a niche thing, anyone who thinks everyone and their grandma will be vibing bespoke software is out to lunch.
Personally I think there is a certain je ne sais quoi about creating software that cannot be distilled to some mechanical construct, in the same way it exists for art, music, etc. So beyond assembly line programming, there will always be a human involved in the loop and that will be a differentiating factor.
Given how I've seen a lot of AI "artists" describe themselves and "their" works, yeah, probably a lot of them would.
I gatekeep my bike, I keep it behind a gate. If you break the gate open and democratize my bike, you're an idiot.
Maybe it's of value that any idiot can do this, but we're still idiots.
You gatekeep your bike, you keep it behind a gate, you don't let anyone else ride it.
Your neighbor got a nicer bike for Christmas, rode it by your house and now you are sad because you aren't the special kid with the bike any more, you are just regular kid like your neighbor.
We can dish it out, but we can’t take it.
As for the comparisons - some are partly comparable to the current situation, but there's some differences as well. Sure books and online content enabled others to join, thereby reducing the "moat" for those who built careers on esoteric knowledge. But it didn't make things _that_ easy - it still required years of invested time to become a good developer. Also, it happened very gradually and while the developer pie was growing, and the range of tech growing, so developers who kept on top of technology (like OP did) could still be valuable. Of course, no one knows fully how it will play out this time around; maybe the pie will get even bigger, maybe there's still room for lots of developers and the only difference is that the tedious work is done. Sure, then it is comparable. But let's be honest, this has a very real chance of being different (humans inventing AI surely is something special!) and could result in skill-sets collapsing in value at record time. And perhaps worse, without opening new doors. Sure, new types of jobs may appear but they may be so different that they are essentially completely different careers. It is not like in the past you just needed to learn a new programming language.
Gates were put in place for lawyers, doctors, and engineers (real ones, not software "engineers") because the cost of their negligence and malpractice was ruined lives and death. Gatekeeping has value.
Software quality, reliability, and security was already lousy before the advent of LLMs, making it increasingly clear that the gate needed to be kept. Gripes about "gatekeeping" are a dogwhistle for "I would personally benefit from the bar being lowered even further".
This discussion is specifically about lowering the barriers of programming and creating using software.
I haven't said anything at all about other professions nor do I think my arguments for democratizing software creation apply to law, medicine, or "real" engineering.
There's also a false equivalence in the software part of your comment. It equates lowering of barriers for recreational/hobby coding with software engineering for serious purposes.
Since you dismiss me as a dogwhistle, I hope my terming your argument as elitist, strawmanish, and full of false equivalences is only seen as fair.
Skill based one of course.
Open research papers, that everyone can access is democratizing knowledge. Accessibile worldwide courses, maybe (like open universities).
But LLMs are not quite the sane. This is taking knowledge from everyone and, in the best case, paywalling it.
I agree in spirit that the original comment was classist, but in this context your statements are also out of place, in my opinion.
- What if these centralized providers had restricted their LLMs to a small set of corporations / nations / qualified individuals?
- What if Google that invented the core transformer architecture had kept the research paper to themselves instead of openly publishing it?
- What if the universities / corporations, who had worked on concepts like the attention mechanism so essential for Google's paper, had instead gatekept it to themselves?
- What if the base models, recipes, datasets, and frameworks for training our own LLMs had never been open-sourced and published by Meta/Alibaba/DeepSeek/Mistral/many more?
I'm pretty sure that someone else would have come around the corner with a similar idea some time later, because the fundamentals of these stuff were already discussed decases before "Attention is all you need" paper, the novel thing they did was combining existing knowhow into a new idea and making it public. A couple of ingredients of the base research for this is decades old (interestingly back then some European universities were leading the field)
I am not trying to be dismissive, but this could apply to all research ever
Cell phones made communication easier for exactly zero people even though billions have been sold. Why? Because they come from just a few different companies.
Similar story to cell phones.
LLMs are in this state right out the gate.
I'm sure that's why they're investing 1 trillion in AI, for the poor illiterates.
—- from a ‘principal engineer’
It's funny you say that, because I've seen plenty of the reverse elitism from "AI bros" on HN, saying things like:
> Now that I no longer write code, I can focus on the engineering
or
> In my experience, it's the mediocre developers that are more attached to the physical act of writing code, instead of focusing on the engineering
As if getting further and further away from the instructions that the CPU or GPU actually execute is more, not less, a form of engineering, instead of something else, maybe respectable in its own way, but still different, like architecture.
It's akin to someone claiming that they're not only still a legitimate novelist for using ChatGPT or a legitimate illustrator for using stable diffusion, but that delegating the actual details of the arrangement of words into sentences or layers and shapes of pigment in an image, actually makes them more of a novelist or artist, than those who don't.