LLM's and especially their derivatives in chat bots and coding agents have brought change to a broad set of domains. In the last couple of months I have developed some thoughts about the new developments.

Separating the Tech from it's Creator

LLM's were undoubtedly the result of large scale data theft and copyright infringements. I am sure of it and support every fight for justice to be served here. At best all AI models should be open-sourced because of it. Till then let's not deceive ourselves about the impact of this new technical paradigm and take advantage of it.

Using the Momentum

We can use this moment in time to point lot's of new tech-enabled people into the right direction.

Fight for Privacy

It sadly never get's old: by default all your data should belong only to you - but that's not true. Services that change that kind of relationship between you and your data should have a unified UX to clearly label all of the implications and allow you to easily deny any requests. But they don't. Most of you data is collected and used against you. Especially coming from products you don't pay for. The good old "If you don't pay for the product, you are the product" holds true. People have to be sensitized that their data is not only used to show them Ad's, but now maybe also to imitate their voice - in live audio or text. LLM's and generic machine learning advancements have made this a very real threat nowadays. Let's make those risks visible even though there is not simple or quick way to do this. Talk about it. Find different angles to talk about the topic, don't bore or annoy people. Privacy education should be coming from the self-empowerment angle, not the doomsday one.

Driving Decentralization

One of the biggest downsides of the current momentum is people getting used to LLM-based products but are unable to host their own. First step is to move to a open-model hosting provider, but the most important one it to word hard towards full model ownership. Own the plug of the damn machine that runs your inference.

Fighting the Mystification of Technology

The term "AI" is as short and sweet as it is poisonous. The picture evoked by "Artificial Intelligence" has something blurry, magical - untouchable. It's stupid tech. It can be explained. It can be created. It can be shaped by you - yes, YOU!!! After years of luring people into "the cloud", there is this collective memory coming back to mind that we can just host shit ourselves. The next years will try to indoctrinate the masses to not only leave their data on someones computer, but also give them authority to run fully dynamic processes using their credentials online.

Trust your instinct's. If you don't just "Login with Google/Facebook/<data_stealing_company_here>" and experience friction, see it as a sign of success on the road to digital sovereignty. Same with findings ways not to use any of the popular inference providers. Find alternatives. The journey itself is very interesting already. There isn't just a few "AI providers" out there but many providers that offer open-source/open-weight models via a familiar API.
I also recommend to make use de-mystifying language like "LLM's" instead of "AI". Seems nit-picky but I am pretty sure of it's un-clouding effect on people, including myself. The sum of all the things will maybe prevent people from ever again believing that a chat bot became sentient. That alone makes it worth to me XD

Celebrating Tech Accessibility

Sadly Programmers are sometimes conceited, feeling above noobs because of their ability to gate-keep a powerful tools: the computer. Seeing a broad influx of people gaining instant capabilities that were previously tied to spending years learning the intricacies of a machine can hurt. But there is no reason to be bitter about the effort spend to master a craft. Bitterness should be preserved for the ones unable to get over the past and unable to feel the breeze of this very moment. You can talk to a computer now. Voice, text, images and it can respond with the same. Computers for everyone! Let's welcome all the people that get excited about computers because they finally seem approachable now. It's wild, it's imperfect but still...better than the DOS terminal! I would have not switched to NixOS by now already, wouldn't it be for LLM's making the process so trivial. Overcoming most of syntax intricacies by plain statements of intent.

Simply using LLM's

You can just use LLM's nicely to do everyday stuff nicer/quicker/more fun of sorts.
That is possible without fanatically running 100 LLM agents in the background 24/7.
Just use the tool to spend more time on planning and reflecting.
Execution got cheaper. The building of great products didn't get easier.
Taste and attention to detail are the differentiating aspects now.

Adapt the technology. Ditch the psychosis around it.

Closing Thoughts

Wild times. Fun times! Going crazy at this day and age is the easiest thing. Choose the hard way: Learn about the tech you depend on. Take back and keep control. Stay curious, open and kind. Don't give up. Ever.

Further Reading

• I love LLMs, I hate hype
• Statement of Purpose, pi.dev