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.
....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.
When things that previously took hundreds of hours of effort to learn now become available with just a few minutes, they become available to all -- even those without all that extra time, which is most people who have a lot of other competing priorities in their lives.
That's democratization.
I don't understand why you're trying to argue against that. It's a dictionary definition. It's just a meaning of the word.
Whatever you seem to be upset about is something else, I don't know what.
....are you being dense on purpose? Just because something takes time and effort to learn doesn't mean it was monopolised and undemocratised lol. It's the natural course of things, and I cannot believe I have to explain that to you.
The knowledge was freely available for the past few decades, way before LLMs - ergo democratised. The skill was freely available to learn - ergo democratised.
By your logic,
- cooking is a skill that is not democratised (despite the fact that you can do it everyday).
- A person who doesn't take time to learn cooking from cookbooks or youtube tutorials is somehow "lacking access" and in an undemocratic position
- An experienced chef is monopolising his mastery of cooking skills bc they dedicated time to learning them
- a robot that manufactures food is "democratising cooking skills"
See how silly that sounds?
Not to mention, using an AI to do a job is NOT equivalent to learning the skills of the job. Me having a printer doesn't mean "painting skills were democratised".
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.