Posted by ulugbekna 7 days ago
As has always been the case, it's the mechanisms used to feed relevant contextual information and process results that sets one tool apart from another. Everyone can code up a small agent that calls in LLM in a loop and passes in file contents. As I'm sure you've noticed, this alone does not make for a good coding agent.
"Copilot chat" isn't open source. It's the service.
In the end, the fact that it exists makes a difference. It won't be useful to all especially non-technical people who've never seen the nuts and bolts of a vscode extension.
I don't understand this criticism.
The criticism is that most of the value is (presumably) on the API service side.
Of course most of the value is on the API service side. That holds true for most applications these days.
I don't think it's well-aimed criticism to say that the LLM design/training material itself should have been made open source. Pretty much no one in the open source community would have the computational resources to actually do anything with this...
I have had what appears to be the same, or similar, complaint against "Web APIs" for many years when trying to access public iinformation. Not that long ago, websites did not have "APIs". Generally, I still extract information from the public websites rather than use "APIs". This requires no sign up and is guaranteed to work as long as the website exists.
Before "Web APIs", websites did not routinely collect email addresses, track usage, rate limit individuals and charge subscription fees in exchange for access to public information.
Sometimes the "Web APIs" are free but "sign up" is always required. There is email address collection, usage is tracked, "accounts" are rate limited. In the past, some HN commenters also complained that these "APIs" are unreliable in the sense that they can be "discontinued" suddenly for any reason. Anyone depending on them has no recourse.
These "Web APIs" became so common that their rationale went unquestioned. For example, why not let www users download bulk data. In rare cases, this is an option, e.g., some government websites, Wikipedia dumps, etc. But this is the exception not the norm.
In light of these comments complaining about accessing LLMs through Web APIs I am wondering:
Are "Web APIs", "SaaS", etc. now being turned against the people who concertedly promoted these tactics, namely, software developers.
I always saw "APIs" as an easy way website operators could deny access to www users. Like some requirement to have an "account" in order to access public information. Those providing these "APIs" have the data in a format they could provide for download, e.g., JSON, but bulk downloads are not provided. This tactic of charging fees is quite different from how websites operated for the first decades I used the www.
Similarly, LLM providers have details about the models, e.g., weights, etc., in formats they could provide for download. Instead, users are encouraged to "sign up", "subscribe", or whatever, for access to public information^1 through an "API".
1. Assuming the provider obtained the training material from the www, a public resource.