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What the article does not even mention is the increasing strength of the much cheaper Chinese OpenWeight models like Qwen.
To be clear, if a genie in a bottle would grant me a free wish, I would request that this technology disappears from existence at least until we have solved the climate problem, found a solution how to compensate creative people and artists, and remedy its impacts on democratic discourse and mental health. But while one is allowed to wish for a better future, this is not the reality we face.
I was requested at work to try out one of the local open weight models yesterday. They are not free, requiring substantial hardware costs, but require less energy than the US models. And it seems with a more modest and more sane approach, companies are not going to pay many hundreds of dollars per month per seat for Claude licences when they can do with far smaller costs.
True that the "weaker" models will still require substantial and qualified human oversight for things like software development, but fully autonomous systems are more like a febrile hypercapitalist pipe dream than something technically desirable.
