this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Selfhosted

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Why do people host LLMs at home when processing the same amount of data from the internet to train their LLM will never be even a little bit as efficient as sending a paid prompt to some high quality official model?

inb4 privacy concerns or a proof of concept

this is out of discussion, I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one. I don't care about anything else than quality of generated answers

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 25 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Privacy would be the main concern. Every single one of your words, documents, pictures will probably end up in some large database over at OpenAI. I don't like that at all. And as a company for example, it might be against the law to share some information about clients with third parties.

Then you don't get any of the freedoms we got with Free Software. It's a service you rely on with very little opportunities to customize, or look inside and tinker. There is little control for the user whatsoever. Additionally we already had companies cease service. So it might become unavailable tomorrow, which is a bad thing if you're attached to it, invested or built things around it.

And since "the internet is for porn"... We also have a noteworthy community doing those kinds of things. And well... go ahead and ask the big services to generate a lewd story. Most of them even refuse to write a murder mystery story for me, instead they'll lecture me on how it is not ethical to murder someone. So that would be use-cases where local AI outperforms any of the market leaders.

Personally, I'm a bit opposed to the entire concept of letting other people's algorithms dictate my life. I don't want to rely on them. I also don't want them to pick the bias for my perspective on the world. The algorithms in social media are dwarfed by how dangerous it's gonna be once people rely on AI more and more. And it gets to choose which information to show and which to drop. What kind of bias to introduce in summaries etc. Teach people how to think. And I already don't like the way all big AI chatbots talk to me with a lot of emojis and in a "Explain like I'm 5 yo" way.

So to go back to the original question... I think the more "useful" AI is, the more reasons there are to retain some control yourself. What do you think?