Large language models have sparked historic shifts in the economics of knowledge, upsetting the balance between accessibility, privacy, and power.

Liberal societies have celebrated their openness. Public records, hearings, and archives are available to anyone who wishes to look, but few can access them. Information may be legally public, but practically unavailable due to the high costs of accessing and analyzing that information. The high cost deterred transparency as interlocutors could, in principle, read everything, but not efficiently. Records were open, but few could extract the signal from the noise.

Democratization of Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) offset that old imbalance by dramatically lowering the cost of search, interpretation, and cross-referencing. In short, LLMs turn openness into accessibility. Following Ronald Coase’s insight that information and coordination are costly, firms exist when it is cheaper to organize internally than to transact through the market. The same principle applies to information environments: LLMs reduce the cost of searching, translating, acquiring, and otherwise transforming text. Keyword search and reading scale linearly with volume, but LLMs shift the slope by vastly reducing the marginal cost of reviewing another million words. The practical effect is that what was previously hidden by abundance becomes accessible.

...read more at thedailyeconomy.org