Hacker News Reader

I agree utility of open source for personal usecase is overblown.

But for commercial usecases, open source is very relevant for privacy reasons as many enterprises have strict policy not to share data with third party. Also it could be a lot cheaper for bulk inference or to have a small model for particular task.

View on HN

However, the same thing could be achieved with closed source models. There's nothing to stop an LLM being made available to run on prem under a restrictive license. It would really be no different to ye olde desktop software - keeping ownership over bits shipped to a customer is solved with the law rather than technical means.

That said, I really hope open source models can succeed, it would be far better for the industry if we had a Linux of LLMs.

> Keeping ownership over bits shipped to a customer is solved with the law rather than technical means.

Yes in theory... In practice, what happened with LLaMA showed people will copy and distribute weights while ignoring the license.

Locally hosted instances that don't report on prompts is important for personal privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com