I recorded an episode of the Oxide and Friends podcast on Monday, talking with Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal about Open Source LLMs.

Too important for a small group to control...

This technology is clearly extremely important to the future of all sorts of things that we want to do.
I am totally on board with it. There are people who will tell you that it’s all hype and bluster. I’m over that. This stuff’s real. It’s really useful.
It is far too important for a small group of companies to completely control this technology. That would be genuinely disastrous. And I was very nervous that was going to happen, back when it was just OpenAI and Anthropic that had the only models that were any good, that was really nerve-wracking.
Today I’m not afraid of that at all, because there are dozens of organizations now that have managed to create one of these things...

On LLMs for learning...

One of the most exciting things for me about this technology is that it’s a teaching assistant that is always available to you.
You know that thing where you’re learning—especially in a classroom environment—and you miss one little detail and you start falling further and further behind everyone else because there was this one little thing you didn’t quite catch, and you don’t want to ask stupid questions?
You can ask stupid questions of ChatGPT anytime you like and it can help guide you through to the right answer.
That’s kind of a revelation.