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There is minimal downside to switching to open models

marble.onl

91–100 of 351 posts

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#91

> Open models are served via various means, some by the companies that released them and some by third parties like OpenRouter. Unfortunately, both of these routes are dodgier in terms of privacy and data sharing, and I would not feel the same comfort sending API calls containing client or confidential data to them. That's why I'm using eurouter.ai with the following routing rule for all my requests: { "model": "glm-…

If data security is an actual concern I don't think there's a solution other than biting the bullet and self-hosting.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use EU specifically? I get not trusting the US, of course, but surely the EU isn't far behind in its desire to spy on its own citizens. Do you not live there?

From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.

>traditional western values

This seems tautological because Europe is pretty weak on the values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc).

What values specifically are you optimizing for here?

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use EU specifically? I get not trusting the US, of course, but surely the EU isn't far behind in its desire to spy on its own citizens. Do you not live there?

From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.

With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have. They all seem to be running full speed towards a surveillance state.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#95
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's at least the possibility that they intentionally degrade the models as time passes. We can't really verify that we're getting what we're paying for all of the time. All the more reason to invest in local inference.

What if the new model is exactly as good as the last model on launch day but better than the last model was on the new model's launch day because it was degraded? Every single time?

The thought has definitely crossed my mind. I don't think it's true because there's definitely an improvement when new models are released.

Maybe the truth is the newest models aren't actually as impressive as we thought. Maybe our perception of progress is being manipulated via months of gradual, silent and unverifiable degradation.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#96

Open source models are still not good enough for now, but with the current speed of one new SOTA every two months, by this time next year we will definitely have cheap open source models at least as good as Fable :)

I don't think we will. The open model labs are too resource constrained to approach Fable or even Opus on the general case and I don't see that changing within a year.

Right now, due to profound shortfalls in both data and hardware compared to the US labs, the OSS models are IMO basically technology demonstrators that in practise are even more jagged than the US labs' efforts. The high points of the jaggedness are close - but number of happy paths is many times fewer, and their behaviour inside the harness is far less refined. Barring some incredible breakthrough I don't think that is changing without a much higher level of resources - which seems impossible given the current hardware environment.

I have no reason to think that Anthropic or OpenAI are in possession of some secret sauce that the Chinese labs can't duplicate given the right resources, but the fact remains that absent those resources they'll remain behind. Barring some incredible bombshell reveal from Huawei I don't think this asymmetry resolves in a year. In three years it may well be a different story.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#97

Have you read about Opencode Go? They are great provider for open model, like GLM 5.2, Deepseek v4 Pro, Kimi 2.7 Code. You should give it shot to them :-)

The amount the HN community, at least from what I’ve seen, is sleeping on OpenCode Go (and zen) is kind of amazing.

$10 a month gets you generous usage with the best open weight models and they claim to have zero retention and not to train on your usage.

It’s unclear to me what the advantages of openrouter are but it seems to be a default I see many people talking about here.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.

>traditional western values This seems tautological because Europe is pretty weak on the values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc). What values specifically are you optimizing for here?

> values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc).

The US federal government forced Paramount to take Colbert off the air. Seems that people in the US don’t actually value these things.

> What values specifically are you optimizing for here?

Probably not being fascist.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#99

> Open models are served via various means, some by the companies that released them and some by third parties like OpenRouter. Unfortunately, both of these routes are dodgier in terms of privacy and data sharing, and I would not feel the same comfort sending API calls containing client or confidential data to them. That's why I'm using eurouter.ai with the following routing rule for all my requests: { "model": "glm-…

GDPR compliant llm was a joke a few months back but here we are

I work in Europe, sometimes with sensitive data, and LLMs weren’t an exception a few months ago.

Maybe it was funny to you, but designing data platforms that respect GDPR and involve LLMs is a thing.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.

With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have. They all seem to be running full speed towards a surveillance state.

That’s not the EU.
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