There is a quiet moment that precedes a sea change, the moment before a long-held secret becomes common knowledge. In the early 2020s, the most advanced artificial intelligence felt like a private language spoken only within the glass walls of a few corporate citadels. It was a kind of digital Latin, its syntax guarded by a technological priesthood. We, the public, were given translations through polished interfaces, clean API calls that delivered answers like pronouncements from an oracle, their inner workings a mystery. There was power in the control of access.
Now, the walls are being dismantled, not by force but by a deliberate act. The source code of many new AI models, along with the weights that define their functioning, are being posted on the internet for anyone to download. Po