This is such a tired argument and it seems to be parroted every single time someone talks about local models on hacker news.
Yes, of course the most economical path is to hand over all your data and become fully dependent on a cloud provider who is already operating as scale, hoping that they won't change/remove models, hamstring capabilities, or raise prices.
If this were a thread about hosting your own email or blog or cloud photos, you'd have plenty of people out here telling you how easy it is to do it yourself instead of relying on Gmail for email or WordPress/Medium/Substack for blogging, or iCloud for cloud photos.
And yet, without fail, every single thread about self hosting local models seems to have some copy/paste form of this cost-savings argument.
Where is the appreciation for this cool thing GP built? Where is the appreciation for the desire to figure out how to host your own version of the incredible capabilities that were not available merely a few years ago? And why, on this site of all places, would someone advocate trading all of the knowledge and independence gained from learning how to host something like this ourselves in favor of throwing it all over the wall to Google?
Come on.
It's quite shocking to me how many experienced, tech-savvy people, who used to care about cookies and ad tracking - are now willingly sending their business strategies, highly confidential contracts, and intimate personal issues to a cloud provider because "it is only $0.0x per million tokens!".
> It's quite shocking to me how many experienced, tech-savvy people, who used to care about cookies and ad tracking - are now willingly sending their business strategies, highly confidential contracts, and intimate personal issues to a cloud provider because "it is only $0.0x per million tokens!".
Because there are more privacy guarantees there, depending on the provider. "But what if they violate their contract!" is some pretty tin-foil hat stuff.
How is this any different than a business running their website out of the cloud, assuming you are using a provider with appropriate contractual terms?
You can care about tracking and ads but still be comfortable storing your backups in the cloud, and many have been for quite awhile, even sometimes without encryption - that is totally different than e.g. Meta actively trying to track you and understand your relationship graph and your purchases etc.
The foundation of the businesses training AI models.
So don't use them for inference.
I'm not sure about the tin-foil-hattedness of worrying about them violating their contract. But that's by-the-by. It is definitely not tin-foil-hat to worry about the data being taken in a breach.
It's no different than generally using AWS.
i think you overestimate the number of tech-savvy people who ever cared about cookies and ad tracking.
I don’t understand the willingness to give up privacy so easily, particularly if you are developing something that you plan to monetize somewhere down the road.
I’m pretty sure that all of those disclaimers that all the AI model makers have for you to sign off on to say that they’re not responsible for anything that might go wrong if your work gets copied accidentally and used someplace else wink wink?
You know the lawsuits for that particular aspect are incoming in the future…
Yeah I use it for hobby only. I would use cloud models to develop new stuff, I don't really care if it gets lost because if I were to publish it it would be FOSS anyway. I hate entrepreneurism and monetisation so I'm happiest being a salaried employee with many hobbies :)
But no way whatsoever I'm uploading my personal files, photos, emails, chats into cloud AI. No way.
I think the price is beyond that though. AFAICT, there's not competitively fast image or video generation on Mac. To buy it will cost me $4000-$12000. So I rent.
And everybody knows advertising is just around the corner.
It will be horrible to be dependent on an AI who is also be trying to sell you various goods and services.
We're going to need AI whose loyalty is to us and only us.