If it was literally impossible to make any profit off AI, how do you think things would look like now?
AI existed long before Big AI. Even if there was no profit incentive, it would still be useful for academic research, physics research, language studies, etc.
LLMs were invented in 2017 (as an improvement upon RNNs from 2014) but for-profit Big AI companies didn’t really exist until 2022.
Note: OpenAI came out with GPT-3 (175 billion parameters) in 2020 but at the time it was still a non-profit company. That year was the point where Big Money decided to invest heavily into AI.
Maybe the open source stuff would exist, after all there will always be nerds doing this stuff for the fun of the game, and some companies would be using the open source models to build customer chat bots or in-house troubleshooting agents. Things that help them move faster or more efficiently. I don’t think the audio, video, or code generating models would be far enough along to be useful at all.
