HN user
I'm not sure where you live, but I'm a consultant and buy my own health insurance for a family of 4. I pay around $1200/month. This includes doctor visits and prescriptions.
My wife had both of our kids on this plan and my deductible was $3,000.
"So what happened Health Care"
Health insurance stopped being insurance when the government forced them to cover everything. You are paying for risks that will never apply to you.
"The people living inside these numbers describe them in nearly identical terms. “All my life, I thought that was the magical goal, ‘six figures,’” one writes. “During the pandemic, I finally achieved this magical goal… and I was wrong.” Sixty-two percent of American consumers live paycheck to paycheck; among those earning over $100,000, the figure is 48 percent."
My cousin makes around 60k/year. He had lower paying jobs before this. He now owns a home in a good area and doesn't live paycheck-to-paycheck.
He saved money for years, invested part of it, and was able to pay a large down payment on his house. His monthly expenses are low and he doesn't buy the latest or greatest.
Too many people spend money on booze, drugs, expensive hobbies, and traveling. They then wonder why they can't ever buy a house and have no money left over at the end of the month.
"Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before"
This had more to do with giving people knowledge and was very inexpensive. We now have the Internet, which allows for the masses to meet, protest, and be subversive.
The only thing threatening our freedoms is Left-leaning politics that have already taken over countries like the UK. I've been following left-leaning politics my whole life. It always starts out wanting freedoms for all. When they actually get power, step 1 is finding ways to censor dissenting viewpoints.
"A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all."
This involves taking from the people that are providing these resources and giving it to the masses, by force (called the government). I don't really see how they are the same.
"This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation."
I can get access to the near-latest LLMs for less than $100/month. Everyone I know is already using some form of LLM at work or has access to it. I'm unsure what your proposal will solve, when it's already so accessible.
A very small percentage of people have the knowledge or desire to use agentic AI.
This sounds like a solution in need of a problem.
I'm in offensive security and use it to write exploit code for various projects I'm working on.
Too many people are using LLMs to shortcut knowledge completely. I have more work than ever fixing the security issues on vibe coded apps, and I don't think it will slow down any time soon.