It's ok to be paid while spreading knowledge!

Universities do it, Google search does it, broadcasters do it.

The only place that doesn't really do it is public libraries, which are all subsidized either by governments or donations.

The intent of the people who built the railroad across America was to seek profit. So too for most of the important vaccines (shout out to Jonas Salk though, absolute mensch who chose not to). Same for many technologies. That doesn’t change the fact that there were massive benefits to millions of others from having those things exist.

Just because AI companies have profit motives doesn’t mean it isn’t cool as heck that some poor kid with a burner Android phone can use a free ChatGPT account to learn about any topic they want.

> they're looting it so they can make a profit

If they're making a profit, it means they're providing a value to customers. In the case of LLM - the value is reducing the friction of accessing knowledge. The knowledge was there all along, but the friction of access too great to generate surplus value.

It is backwards thinking to propose that we are worse off by enabling access to knowledge.