I don't understand how people don't consider this.
Plus you're spec'd out of near-SOTA level in months.
The only reasons to actually do this are a) you have a lot of dispensable income and are a hobbyist/tinkerer, b) you have real, legitimate privacy concerns or, relatedly, c) you're doing something you don't want to get flagged
Not everything is about pure cost. Maybe I don't want to sell my soul supporting the frontier labs because they are straight up pure evil?
I barely see a difference between buying the hardware that feeds (and often colludes with) those labs, at least not as a moral stance.
Even if you trained your own model, you'd be committing some of the same sins, paying for the same hardware that drove it, etc. But if you're using some open model, you're standing on the shoulders of the same corrupt giants.
I feel like when people say this is due to moral reasons, it's to justify an expensive hobby.
I mean it's entirely a personal decision. I didn't mean to come across judgemental, if anyone uses the frontier models I don't hold it against them. But for me personally I am very against the frontier labs in general. This technology is too powerful to not be at least open weights, but preferably open source.
I also differentiate using their tech and paying them money. I don't think using their models, or perhaps using models derived from them as inherently evil. I just do not want to actually contribute to their bottom line in any way. Even if that means a slower ramp up of AI in general. In my opinion we could move slower.
I understand Nvidia is working with the labs to assist them to buy more hardware through financing and other deals. But ultimately I do not view that as the same as contributing directly to their P&L.
"you don't want to get flagged"
Ding!
What is actually getting you flagged by the openweights inference providers? Thus far I haven't hit any of the reverse engineering or infosec guardrails that Anthropic is so keen on
While I'm sure some of the open weight providers do this as well, I think the comparison is frontier labs v local inference.