Ask HN: Don't You Mind That LLMs Are Mostly Proprietary?
8 dakiol 11 5/19/2025, 10:03:29 PM
I'm not sure if it's just me getting older or what, but something strikes me as odd about the future of programming and software engineering: LLMs are impressive, but you have to pay to use them. I can't recall another core tool or technology in the software industry—something central not just to the field, but to the world—that isn't free or open source. Think TCP/IP, the Linux kernel, Postgres, Git, ffmpeg, qemu, Latex, Kubernetes, and so on. Sure, there's plenty of proprietary software out there, but it's not the backbone of the internet or the computing industry.
Now, LLMs have the potential to become part of that backbone, yet nobody seems particularly concerned that they’re not open source (I'm talking about GPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini). I know there are open source alternatives, but they’re not nearly as capable—and it seems most people here are perfectly fine using and paying for the proprietary ones.
I don’t like a future where I have to pay for every token just to write a program. And don’t tell me, "Well, just don’t use LLMs"; they’re going to become what Linux is today: ubiquitous.
I think LLMs might follow this market pattern where you can buy something to host yourself and then commoditization happens enough where open source solutions will also evolve to have good enough solutions.
An idea for a disrupting company would be to open source their LLM and offer support and feature development to enterprises as the paid offering, kinda like Red Hat or others doing that model. A key difference is running an LLM locally on decent sized compute is fine but it will be costly to scale on your own.
They certainly are capable (DeepSeek being the obvious example), the problem is that they're still too expensive to run and there's no currently differentiator to compete with the big players who are likely selling inference at a loss.
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For what it's worth, I absolutely share your concerns around the fact that LLM models are now proprietary. I want to see more open-source (or at least open-weight) models being built
Strictly speaking - we don't really know if this is true. There is no study proving AI gets smarter up to a certain point. It might keep scaling forever, or one day we might unknowingly reach the soft limit of LLM intelligence. I think assertions like the one you're making require specific evidence.
For comparison's sake, proprietary models like GPT-3 now pale in comparison to the results you get from a 7b Open Source LLM. The Open Source stuff really does move along, if not at the pace everyone would prefer.
LLMs are natural language models (what words are likely to come next given the context), not any sort of AGI. For that purpose, the gap between open and closed models is closing much faster in LLMs than CAD. I think LLMs will go the way of chess engines -- one of these models will become the Stockfish of LLMs and the proprietary models will end up being a waste of money and resources.