I think their hearts are in the right place, but IMO most of the concerns about user freedom are obviated or transformed by the existence of these new talking machines.<p>(Just in the interest of disclosure, I'm a "Free" software partisan (I don't see the point of "Open" source.) I don't want to argue about it, I'm just being upfront about my own bias.)<p>It seems to me that we have three great UI paradigms: CLI, GUI, and now LLM. The first is typically seen by normals as inscrutable and esoteric, the domain of computer "wizards". The second is "computer" in the minds of most normals, this is how you get University courses on e.g. how to operate MS office software, etc. The third, speech, is of course learned automatically as children.<p>From now on the kind of programming we know (and love, some of us) is obsolete. No one wants to operate symbolic calculators via janky teletype machines. No one really wants to learn boring video games like Excel or Word. We want to tell the computer what to do and have it do that. Well, now we can.<p>But that means that we, the hackers and computer nerds, are now playing with model trains. (That's my metaphor: am I writing code people will actually use? If not, then I'm playing with my model trains. Nothing wrong with that! Fantastic hobby! But I'm not starting a shipping company with N gauge trains, yeah?)<p>It seems to me that now, in 2023, most needful software has already been written, just as most needful technology has already been invented, and the focus of an organization like FUTO should be on simple open hardware, an open library of algorithms and DBs, and a simple LLM UI, all on top of something like Glamorous Toolkit. Plug that into an open IoT, declare victory.<p>The rest of the job is marketing.