How the education system adjusts to this tech will be interesting to watch. I expect that humans who understand how stuff works is going to be a requirement for the foreseeable future, and societies will inevitably adjust. There's always been panic and chaos every time new a disruptive technology has been invented, but humanity inevitably adjusts to it. I don't see any reason to think this will be any different.

There are already chips being developed specifically for running LLMs, so it's almost certain this will become akin to having a GPU in the future.

• https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html
• https://wccftech.com/alibabas-tsmc-built-5nm-risc-v-chip-xuantie-c950-now-runs-qwen-3-8-27b-model-natively-unlocking-massive-vertical-integration-tailwinds/

And this tech is now being developed in China as well, so you might not have to rely on western hardware either going forward. Chinese companies are building stuff on top of RSIC-V like the Alibaba chip I linked above, and I fully expect there will be a lot of focus on Linux as China continues to decouple from the US tech stack.

I can see a completely different kind of future where local models that run on commodity software get good enough for what most people need to do. At that point we'd be in a world that Stallman envisioned with every user having full control over what's running on their machine, and being able to build whatever features they want. We already see how it's becoming trivial to reverse engineer complex apps like Photoshop, or to crack PS5 games using LLMs. We are likely end up in a world where closed source is dead because code itself no longer has any value because anybody can copy and reproduce any application trivially.

And we are already starting to get there. Qwen 3.8 27b is comparable in terms of capability to Opus 4.6 which was a frontier model just half a year ago. If Qwen 4 gets to about Opus 5.5 level sometime next year, that's going to be good enough for making vast majority of software that people need. After that it's just a matter of further optimization or hardware getting better so it can run on most computers. But just to reiterate, it's already running on consumer grade hardware, and it can do real work today.

I completely agree, using an open model would be far more inline with the spirit of open source.

lifting import controls on renewables from China would be a good start

It does look like software devs are starting to wake up. Amusingly, AI is really helping people realize they don't live in a democracy. A lot of the complaints we see from software developers boil down to the fact that they don't get to decide how the technology evolves or how they work with it. The idea that people in the west live in a democracy and they get to make all the decisions drilled into them from a very young age. AI being pushed on them without them being able to have any say in the matter is jarring because it exposes how liberal democracy has an underlying class character to it.

exactly

It's pretty clear that the cost imposed on Europe is far higher than the cost imposed on Russia. The reality of the situation is that there is a constant demand for Russian exports, and it's not hard to find buyers. Meanwhile, Europe cut itself off from its main supplier, and then the US cut Europe off from Gulf oil. So, Europe is now paying for energy through the nose, and it sits downstream from the intermediaries. When push comes to shove, countries will save oil and gas for their own use leaving Europeans out in the cold.

Except that Europe is actively aiding and abetting the US in the war on Iran.

While that's all true, these developments are happening within a broader energy system that remains structurally dependent on fossil fuels and none of them change that underlying dynamics in a meaningful way. For example, EV sales in Nordic countries represent just one segment of transport, but do nothing to address the freight, aviation, shipping, and industrial heat sectors where oil and gas remain entrenched. Spain's solar buildout is genuinely impressive, yet Spain also heavily relies on the European grid which runs on natural gas for balancing and heating. Offshore wind and long duration batteries are necessary, but their deployment pace is far below what would be required to retire gas peakers and baseload fossil plants across Europe. Meanwhile, hydrogen installations in Germany are mostly small pilot projects that consume electricity rather than displace oil and gas at any useful volume. All these efforts, however laudable, operate within a system whose economics, infrastructure, and political incentives still favor fossil fuels. These kinds of isolated successes will not move the needle on the overall fossil fuel dependence.

Sure, fossil fuels need to be phased out, but that's going to be a decades long process. The only country that's trying to do that at scale right now is China, and even after rolling out renewables on an absolutely mindbogglingly scale, they still rely on fossil fuels for roughly half their energy. Europe hasn't even started taking any meaningful action in this direction.

China would like to disagree.