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Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

Do these self hosted models avoid "protecting the user" or protecting big businesses? In other words can I just ask it any question and if it has the answer, I will get an answer rather than telling me it can't answer the question?

I ask because Claude is fun for rewriting abandoned code and I am not a proper developer so it's been great for me. Claude refuses to answer questions about science and medicine that stray outside of the officially supported narratives of the AMA and I have issues that have surpassed anything a doctor can do so I am entirely on my own. Will the self hosted models answer such questions or will it also try to put walls or bumper guards around topics?

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Out of the box, open-weight models have guardrails similar to the rest. But unlike the closed models they can be 'abliterated' with varying degrees of success. If you run an aggressive Heretic abliteration of Qwen 3.6 27B you will not generally experience either refusals or an obvious degradation in quality.

I personally like the https://huggingface.co/HauhauCS version of Qwen 27B from a purely subjective point of view as a user, but that particular one has come under criticism for reasons that don't necessarily affect its quality or usability.

Some of the larger models have also undergone similar treatment, but it's less common.

> Do these self hosted models avoid "protecting the user" or protecting big businesses? In other words can I just ask it any question and if it has the answer, I will get an answer rather than telling me it can't answer the question?

For the most part, open base models are corporate releases with somewhat similar guardrails to commercial hosted models (not quite as complete, because hosted models tend to have a combination of trained and external guardrails applied); but no one is monitoring and trying to terminate your account for using jailbreak prompts, and there are often community finetunes available that (among other things) weaken the trained-in guardrails.

Of course, even if the model does answer, it may nto answer according to the particular worldview that produces hostility to the “narratives of the AMA”.

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