You don’t need Sam Altman or his big, beautiful LLM

We’ve been here before.

At so many pivotal moments in our adoption of digital technology, people and businesses mistake a company’s walled garden for the broader, more powerful network underneath. In the 1990s, many people genuinely believed AOL was the internet. When I left Facebook in 2013, hundreds of people asked how I would function “without the web.” Over and over, packaged products—operating systems, app stores, streaming services—eclipse quieter, less expensive, bottom-up alternatives like Linux or torrents. We forget they exist.

Today we’re making the same mistake with large language models.

To many of us, “AI” now means choosing among a handful of commercial LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok—and perhaps even choosing the one that matches our cultural or political s