I have done a few open-source projects (none of those took off, but that’s OK). I did them because I wanted to give to the people, not greedy corporations. It was an implicit contract with the world, which has been broken by AI. You can say “but it was never written!” Maybe. It still hurts. (And it is also not really true: for example MIT requires attribution, which I’m still waiting to see in all of the AI-generated/AI-helped projects…)

It was also a joy to write things and know certain like-minded people would like it. Now I don’t really want to do that anymore.

> to the people

And corporations are made up of people. People who decide to organize to form a legal entity so that they can operate as a business. Some people may choose to run it as a solo proprietorship - others want to raise money and form groups so they can do bigger things. They are still people.

I feel amazing that code that I wrote contributed to development of this amazing technology. "Greedy corporations"? I can download Qwen 3.8 27B today for free and run it myself and not pay for anything but electricity. I get the same performance that I would have had to pay $20-$100/mo. ~6 months ago (which frankly, was pretty cheap for what it got me).

The "greedy corporations" btw, also spent billions and did a lot more than just dump the code into a gradient descent algo (RLVR and more) to get the models to the place they are at today. Simply dumping GitHub into a transformer neural net would not give you a coding model even close to what exists today - open or proprietary. For $20/mo., I can now explore subjects that I wouldn't have even considered looking at before. For me, personally, that is a good tradeoff.

And yet, none of that invalidates what I said.