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Seeing the usual suspects dismiss this as delusional, cope, etc., but if you were involved in moving this needle beforehand, you will have felt the balance of power shift in a meaningful way.

And if you aren't paying attention, this probably reads like advocating to pay Anthropic and OpenAI to be able to maintain software for the rest of our lives. But open weight models are just unbelievably good now! Like, you actually wouldn't believe it unless you saw it yourself.

I made the decision very early on that there was no way I'd be using proprietary models for the same reasons I avoid as much proprietary software as possible in other aspects of my life: I don't want to form a dependency on something that can be changed or revoked without my input.

Everyone copes with change in different ways, and I try not to fault anyone for burying their head in the sand about it. But we are in the fucking thick of it now, folks.

You could blow up OpenAI and Anthropic tomorrow, but there's no dependency on them anymore. The weights are out there. Anyone with a rack of GPUs will sell you inference for pennies on the dollar, in whatever jurisdiction you like.

So what can this do for you and your community? A lot of things, and I think that's something we need to get better at communicating and writing about generally.