> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.
Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.
You know what they mean by that term, it's about building things without needing to put in the learning effort. I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something they would not have done via learning to code and typing it manually.
It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative difference in the people now able to generate whatever they want versus needing to draw something by hand, so saying "they could've just learned to draw themselves" is not very convincing. People don't want to do that yet still get an output, and I see nothing wrong with that, and if you do, it's just another sort of gatekeeping, that the "proper" way is to learn it by hand.
Okay, they are paying Anthropic, I don't really care about the semantics when at the end of the day they get an output they didn't get before.
Open weight models run on consumer hardware, if you think corporations will make every single piece of hardware unaffordable then I'm not sure what to tell you.
Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.