Old money vs new money. You can read about that more in books like The Great Gatsby.
If you read The Rich and the Super-rich, he talks quite a bit about how they make use of foundations to keep money out of the hands of the public.
The book is pretty old now, but I doubt the game has changed all that much.
I doubt it’s any coincidence that all these new money players - Zuckerberg, Musk, Ellison, and Gates all have foundations…all of that money would likely be better managed by public initiatives (assuming we don’t have insane administration like we do right now, of course), but due to their personal arrogance and the secret mission of PRESERVING wealth, they form these foundations.
And quite a few people think that these guys are really the best people (due to Worthington’s Law) to oversee and direct money at various problems to be solved - call me skeptical, even in the case of Gates, who may actually be sincere in some things and have the aptitude for it.
I don’t even know who is paying for most of it, to be honest. I know some people that buy an LLM subscription. I know companies will pay for per-seat licenses to things like Copilot.
But I see LLM use in Duckduckgo. I see it jammed into every product we are already paying for at work - MS stuff, Slack, hell, I lost track of all the places where some AI bubble has popped up saying how X product has added AI to help me summarize things. But who is really paying extra for any of that?
And don’t get me started on how I can download and run various models via Ollama or the like on even older GPU(s) and get decent performance for a lot of problems, all without handing over a CC# to someone, along with all my data for them to mine.