I mean, the long arch of computing history has had us wobble back and forth in regards to how closed down it all was, but it seems we are almost at a golden age again with respect to good enough (if not popular) hardware.
On the software front, we definitely swung back from the age of Microsoft. Sure, Linux is a lot more corporate than people admit, but it’s a lot more open than Microsoft’s offerings and it’s capable of running on practically everything except the smallest IOT device.
As for LLMs. I know people have hyped themselves up to think that if you aren’t chasing the latest LLM release and running swarms of agents, you are next in the queues for the soup kitchens, but again, I don’t see why it HAS to play out that way, partly because of history (as referenced), partly because open models are already so impressive and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t continue to do well.
In fact, I do my day-to-day work using an open weight model. Beyond that, can only say I know employers who will probably never countenance using commercially hosted LLMs, but who are already setting up self-hosted ones based on open weight releases.
I don't think we're in any golden age since the GPU shortages started, and now memory and disks are becoming super expensive too.
Hardware vendors have shown they don't have an interest in serving consumers and will sell out to hyperscalers the moment they show some green bills. I fear a day where you won't be able to purchase powerful (enough) machines and will be forced to subscribe to a commercial provider to get some compute to do your job.