The irony of this rationale to me is that an LLM is fluid and adaptable to dynamic, variable norms and tools across a given set of projects in a way a human contributor would not be.
For the last year or so I have used Niri window manager exclusively. It's out there, even by Linux tiling window manager standards, and it's the most delightful window management experience I've ever had. I'm guessing there isn't anything remotely like it on Windows or MacOS.
As you say, there is incredible variety and innovation to be found in Linux desktops. The post would make more sense if it mainly concerned itself with the UX stagnation on MacOS IMO.
I can't speak for all, but many mature open source communities have explicit or ad-hoc reputation schemes that are used to triage contributions. A fresh account means starting over with zero reputation, which in turn means your contributions wait at the back of the line.
I strongly prefer a world where open models "win," that said...
I don't understand how we will sustain an ecosystem of open models like the one that exists today. My thoughts go down this path every time I try to put the pieces together:
- Many open models depend on high quality frontier models as a distillation input
- US closed frontier models drive China's open model strategy despite the business model for open models being somewhat fuzzy
- What is the business model that benefits from open weights, exactly? How do their vendors recoup infrastructure and training costs?
I would be grateful to be enlightened on this topic.
Yeah but open source is often a few guys working on their free time, or a large company open sourcing libraries that they wouldn't be able to sell anyway, or donations from corporations that are at best in the order of a million dollars.
For frontier models you have players investing billions.
I'm all for framing the spirit this way, so long as we recognize that it was rather difficult to come up with the sum total of human creative output (noting also that approximately zero of the cost to produce it has been born by frontier labs so far).
