It seems the best self-hosted and the worst models served by big providers has some considerable overlap in quality.

Whatever reason people have to run those (cheaper? backwards compatibility once you get something running) surely applies to the open models too, maybe even more so.

Any tips on which model to use and how to use them? I have 64 RAM and 16 VRAM (I know it's not a lot, it's a gaming GPU) and I'm trying to find a good model to use but it's a bit of a struggle

Headline: "The is minimal downside"

Article: "I’m hoping it’s going to be minimal"

What open models are "recommended"?

I like the Linux analogy, I struggled with Linux way back.

OK, now what? Someone offers open models as a service? That's basically a time-sharing computing business - people at terminals sharing remote computing resources. If you buy your own H100 it will be idle while you're typing or reading or thinking. So sharing makes sense.

But it doesn't have to be an "AI company". It's just a compute service. The companies that offer web hosting could get into this.

Is it just me or is half the article missing?

I enjoyed the first part though

But, what model are you using?

and what hardware are you using?

I am absolutely pro local and true open source models.

Personally I haven't seen any productivity gain since Opus 4.5 times.

But: I can't fully get behind the opinion that (so called) "open source models" are simply superior and will be in the future, because when I asked some models who they are, they answered with "I am Claude from Anthropic", which could mean they have been trained by exfiltrating Claude.

I have NO moral objection to this, as Anthropic and "Open""AI".also trained their models on anything they could get their hands on.

It's more about the question: can and will these models be updated, even if Anthropic et al fail. Who's gonna pay for training then? What's their incentive? Have we reached a plateau?

I think once the hardware process comes down and these mini DGXs become cheaper, and by then open models still be smaller and better, there is going to be less and less reason to use the providers. CEOs are already complaining that they are costing too much. There are also large organisations like Banks which can't use external services and are already looking at internal housing. it's a good thing so the big AI companies just went IPO as once the self hosting trend kicks in they are going bust.

>There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk1. First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted

For a while during this era, I used to port my laptops windows installation into a virtual machine that can run on Linux. It took a bit of hacking away but I could usually do it in a day or two. Then its all Linux with the windows vm being used for the microsoft stuff.