Live data from Hacker News

Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

theregister.com

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#11
> Amodei, meanwhile, outlined some very specific things he wants from Washington: Stop selling Nvidia chips to China so its AI companies can’t build better models, and a crackdown on model distillation.

You have to be the embodiment of hubris to believe the only reason a technologically advanced country of 1.4 billion people with several AI labs and government support can make competitive models is because they all distill yours.

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Is there one you’d recommend in particular when working with sensitive data?

You might want to consider a local setup? Personally I do model + llama.cpp + Pi + tmux, that's as barebones as you can get and everything is great. I also use opencode for bigger task, I could probably hook that to a local model but I'm not sure (still new to this). But if you work with sensitive data you need a local setup purely.

I am interested in a local setup but whenever I read about it, it seems the money is better spent on cloud inference since even with thousands of dollars of my own hardware I wouldn’t have frontier like capability? I am bad at choosing models though (I just throw everything at Opus atm).

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#13
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Is there one you’d recommend in particular when working with sensitive data?

I’m biased (my wife works there) but Fireworks or another US-based inference provider is going to be a better fit than OpenRouter. Fireworks has zero data retention by default[1] and has tools to make it easy to run your existing harness against open models [2] OpenRouter isn’t a provider, they route to other providers, so you would need to specify which ones you’re comfortable with anyway. [1]: https://docs.firework…

Fantastic thank you!

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#14
post #3

Can anyone recommend me a viable alternative to these clowns? I would like to move my work (excel and light coding) off the big guys. My computer isn’t very powerful though so I need to upgrade or find hosted models (host my own?) that won’t steal my sensitive data? Edit: miss me with the downvotes. These guys are clowns. I want alternatives. Thank you to everyone offering help!

Opencode go for 10$ a month is fantastic. Just use it with Glm5.2-flash.

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#15
post #9
post #3

Can anyone recommend me a viable alternative to these clowns? I would like to move my work (excel and light coding) off the big guys. My computer isn’t very powerful though so I need to upgrade or find hosted models (host my own?) that won’t steal my sensitive data? Edit: miss me with the downvotes. These guys are clowns. I want alternatives. Thank you to everyone offering help!

A lot of companies are starting to run towards open models on walled off infra. There might be a moat to be had in really good infra-as-a-service for hosting models, but there’s zero moat to be had in the models themselves. Which is a problem for those trying to convince people a proprietary model company should be worth trillions.

I am interested in running my own infra but the cost doesn’t seem worth it? Have you setup something local that’s viable?

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#16
post #3

Can anyone recommend me a viable alternative to these clowns? I would like to move my work (excel and light coding) off the big guys. My computer isn’t very powerful though so I need to upgrade or find hosted models (host my own?) that won’t steal my sensitive data? Edit: miss me with the downvotes. These guys are clowns. I want alternatives. Thank you to everyone offering help!

Openrouter is not ideal, because you don't know who they send your traffic to and there are rumours of vendors cheating by providing quantized models.

I'm very happy with Deepinfra. Less model coverage, but good prices and quite fast.

However I have to caution you about one thing.

No one will give you as many input tokens for so little money as Claude Max x5 (maybe x20 too, I use x5).

I tend to use 1.1B to 1.4B a week about 0.8-1B cached. Even with cache were talking thousands of $ in API prices a week. Hundreds if we're talking cheap cloud like Deepinfra.

However, local AI well setup is actually a good alternative for this if Claude Max was unavailable.

For example my system a ryzen 7950x 192GB ram, 5x rtx3090 plus an rtx5060 ti 16gb. (3 rtx3090 cards via usb4 egpu dock). Let's me run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next with 3slots (no rtx5060 used) at 55tok/s decode dropping to 50 at the end of a 260k context, 1200tok/s refill dropping to 950 at the end of context.

With RAM and ssd cashing and 80% cache were talking on the order of 4B a week could be ingested by this setup (roughly) if it was running 24/7. I found 6 interactive cloud code sessions are fairly pleasant with this 3 user setup.

If I include the rtx5060 in the mix I can bump to 5 users, but it slows down by about 15% (note the speeds are give are for one active user, multiple users at once see maybe 70% of tgat per user so aggregate is much higher in multi user setup).

So in theory I should be able to run 10 cloud code sessions. Although I'm testing CC alternative now (pi with own plugins) because this model, while multimodal has only 260k context 30k of which CC eats on the getgo.

Many people say local AI makes no sense financially. But in the event you process huge inputs that are often cached it does make sense.

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#17

> Amodei, meanwhile, outlined some very specific things he wants from Washington: Stop selling Nvidia chips to China so its AI companies can’t build better models, and a crackdown on model distillation. You have to be the embodiment of hubris to believe the only reason a technologically advanced country of 1.4 billion people with several AI labs and government support can make competitive models is because they all d…

Nobody thinks a distillation crackdown is a long term plan, but it does delay Chinese labs for the couple years while they are compute-starved. Of course they could make competitive models if they were drowning in NVIDIA chips but they aren't, and the native ones aren't at scale production for at least a year.

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#18
post #16
post #3

Can anyone recommend me a viable alternative to these clowns? I would like to move my work (excel and light coding) off the big guys. My computer isn’t very powerful though so I need to upgrade or find hosted models (host my own?) that won’t steal my sensitive data? Edit: miss me with the downvotes. These guys are clowns. I want alternatives. Thank you to everyone offering help!

Openrouter is not ideal, because you don't know who they send your traffic to and there are rumours of vendors cheating by providing quantized models. I'm very happy with Deepinfra. Less model coverage, but good prices and quite fast. However I have to caution you about one thing. No one will give you as many input tokens for so little money as Claude Max x5 (maybe x20 too, I use x5). I tend to use 1.1B to 1.4B a wee…

I haven’t heard of Deepinfra so I’ll check them out!

I think your local setup would be a bit much for me capability / price wise. But maybe I can find a scaled down version. I don’t need insane tok/s. Oftentimes I just let things run and come back later.

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#19
post #3

Can anyone recommend me a viable alternative to these clowns? I would like to move my work (excel and light coding) off the big guys. My computer isn’t very powerful though so I need to upgrade or find hosted models (host my own?) that won’t steal my sensitive data? Edit: miss me with the downvotes. These guys are clowns. I want alternatives. Thank you to everyone offering help!

Opencode go for 10$ a month is fantastic. Just use it with Glm5.2-flash.

I’ll take a look thank you!

Re: Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture

#20

> Amodei, meanwhile, outlined some very specific things he wants from Washington: Stop selling Nvidia chips to China so its AI companies can’t build better models, and a crackdown on model distillation. You have to be the embodiment of hubris to believe the only reason a technologically advanced country of 1.4 billion people with several AI labs and government support can make competitive models is because they all d…

They have such a weird and outdated view of China, it's almost comical. It's like America's answer to everything bad coming to them is protectionism. They still think China is a third world country with a bunch of factories and polluting industries not able to do anything else other than manufacturing products for foreign companies
Post reply on HN