I understand the impulse to assume that, but good software can be built with AI (as long as the right verification loops are used), and new maintainers won't necessarily drop their creations once it gets hard.
You very well may be right; development might be easy come, easy go. But maybe not! (Hopefully not, in this case. It looks cool.)
No, it means some billionaires catch strays and have to sell one of their yachts out of their fleet, or cut dividends. The collapse of the current Google/Microsoft security and management duopoly would be less impactful on the average computer user than the death of flash player.
None of this is for you; it's for money. It's someone else's empire. Cybersecurity is a farce, and western culture would quickly recover from a complete collapse, and be better off for it.
compliance is payed for by the parties ensuring the compliance.
so yes if the cybersecurity was not strong enough, some big companies would go bankcrupt or change their TOS.
And then others would emerge, and the cat mouse game of hackers and viruses in the 2000s would pick up again.
We had a bit of a calm period when Anti virus programs in windows didnt do much anymore
> No, it means some billionaires catch strays and have to sell one of their yachts out of their fleet, or cut dividends.
Their capital isn't your body armour.
Anything it costs them has all the impact of an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff, when we could have a fence at the top.
> The collapse of the current Google/Microsoft security and management duopoly would be less impactful on the average computer user than the death of flash player.
Add Cisco (CVE-2026-20213), NGINX (CVE-2026-27654), the Linux kernel (CVE-2026-31554), ImageMagick (CVE-2026-33901), FreeRDP (CVE-2026-40033), OpenSSL (CVE-2026-45447), Suricata (CVE-2026-45751), FreeBSD (CVE-2026-4747), PostgreSQL (CVE-2026-6479), and Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird NSS library (CVE-2026-6772).
> None of this is for you; it's for money. It's someone else's empire. Cybersecurity is a farce, and western culture would quickly recover from a complete collapse, and be better off for it.
Cybersecurity is indeed a farce; one does not put out a dumpster fire by pouring on gasoline. Well, not unless it's a huge amount, and then you've got gasoline everywhere off-gassing and one spark from being much worse.
Due to tech being over-sold as a solution to everything, it has been so heavily integrated in our infrastructure that "a complete collapse" would be devastating.
We see small, limited, isolated incidents already, just from Ukraine blowing up Yandex servers and by extension knocking out random chunks of Russian economy, or unknown hackers switching French/Dutch/US fridges to defrost overnight spoiling the food, or messing with water control systems in (fortunately small) reservoirs, Revolut not working for a bit when one European DC went down, and some stupidity where a root signing certificate had a private key of "4" for 18 months without anyone noticing.
Do this everywhere all at once, and it's likely we get mass blackouts, banking in general stops, software updates and signing can't be trusted to undo the mess. It's anywhere from "really bad" to "civilisational crisis" if it dropped in unexpected and unprepared for.
It opened the floodgates, though. It was a real paradigm shift. After LLaMa, everybody saw that you could release large open models without any negative repercussions, and DeepSeek et al. hopped aboard the wagon. LLaMa was the first popular model that was truly open to the global public.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
I am serious. I believe that the LLM is the defining technology of our time -- at least as important and as impactful as the internet itself -- and that Meta's opening of LLaMa has profoundly changed the landscape for the better.
Let's stop saying that open weight models are open source. They are just a software that you can run on your own hardware (if you have a ton of money to spend to get it anyway) but they are not open, they are as open as any proprietary software that you can run on your PC is.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
I never said they were open source. Everything else you wrote is factually incorrect.
When you run a proprietary program (like Adobe Photoshop or a closed-source game) on your PC, you get a compiled binary of machine code. The high-level logic is stripped out, variables are obfuscated, and the EULA legally forbids you from decompiling, reverse-engineering, or modifying the binary.
With an open model, you get the actual Python/C++/CUDA code defining the exact mathematical structure of the model. And you get a weights file, which is an unencrypted, open array of floating-point numbers representing every synaptic strength in the network.
So you can inspect the exact mathematical state of the model at any arbitrary moment during inference -- in other words, you can study open models. You can fine-tune or quantize them -- in other words, you can improve them quite significantly! And much much more.
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