I still believe that the strength of AI is when it can be applied locally in a secure and private manner, rather than yet another cloud-based service you must pay for indefinitely even as it gets progressively worse to satiate the greed of corporate shareholders.
ChatGPT and Anthropic will never, ever get me to tie my Health Data to their systems, but I still believe in the capabilities of AI in identifying patterns from data I would otherwise overlook, and sorely want a local-only ecosystem where I can expose this data safely, privately, and securely to something like Qwen or Gemma for processing.
Same goes for Smart Homes, and Personal Assistants. The corporate approach of letting Company A access your data stored at Company B and processed by Companies D and E while also sold to Advertisers and Data Brokers with no way for you to extract or view it on your local hardware - just isn’t tenable for these sorts of intimate use cases. I want my data to be owned and controlled and exposed on my terms, to be used to improve my life first rather than someone else’s bottom line. I want technology to give me back more of my time and improve my outcomes again, and I’ve been burned enough by Big Tech in the past that I flatly reject any presumption of nobility or public good from their AI-as-a-Service business model.
The capability is there, and I definitely think the folks working to build local tooling that supports and unlocks the potential for local models are the ones in the right. I love seeing what they build.
The thing about "local" models for me is that they usually mean open-weight (and maybe open-source too), so they can be used locally, yes, but they can also be hosted by independent providers! With models like Qwen, DeepSeek and others, you aren't tied to a single corp, you can switch between indie providers, some of which may give you better privacy guarantees. That allows you to use the models even on devices uncapable of running them, if they have an Internet connection.
The strength with AI is with open-source models. We need to keep away from vendor lock-in and use models that allow both local usage and hosting by independent providers.