Local models?
- watermark-free generation
- the stripping of watermarking from the output of SAAS models
Any discussion of watermarking is dead in the water in a world where we are permitted to have these things. I fear for the future.
No, I will not chill. The war on general purpose computing is gonna get real hot real soon.
If they give it to every teacher it’s the same as giving it to everyone so they’re not going to do that.
- not being locked into a provider
- not being forced to have your prompts saved by a possible competitor
- an alternative to the duolopy we quickly see forming
- offline access
I fear for the future without local models, much more than the future with them, and would rather everyone had access to a local model than be certain we catch everyone copy+pasting LLM responses. Watermarking would be cool, but it's not worth losing local for.
In the long run... well, general purpose computing is under threat anyway. Platforms with locked bootloaders and mandatory digital signatures outnumber those that don't. Even on "PCs", the openness is merely a cultural norm observed for a particular market segment[0] by Apple and Microsoft - for they are the only ones with true root keys. Even a brand new motherboard comes with Microsoft signing keys pre-flashed, and you are permitted to enroll your own only by grace. The technical infrastructure to flip a switch and lock it all down is now in place, ready to go at the stroke of a pen. Will you be able to get Llama.cpp from "the app store"? I hazard not. If you think this sounds hyperbolic, look at what is happening to Android.
[0] They don't even segment it the same! Apple segments by "does it have a keyboard", and Microsoft segments it by "does it have a native x86 processor". Apple runs different software on the same basic hardware, Microsoft runs the same basic software on different hardware, but both have created artificially restricted second class computing categories.