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Comment by txrx0000 | Hacker News Reader

It pays off instantly, because OpenAI/Anthropic can no longer see what I'm doing and that's worth a lot of money to me. If I am offloading some of my thought processes to a machine, I want to own that machine. And if I finetune the model, I can gain access to parts of thought space that are cordoned off by OpenAI/Anthropic/Alibaba/whomever due to their "alignment" efforts (i.e. alignment to the AI company rather than me). Otherwise, it's like if someone else owns a part of my mind and has a backdoor into my mind.

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You can't run recent openAI/Anthropic models locally anyway, so wouldn't a better comparison be a different provider running Qwen or similar model? As then you can also compare against the exact model you'd have locally and any different data privacy of that particular provider?

Technically true, but the delay between local and closed frontier is only a few months. And individual sovereignty / digital bodily integrity is almost priceless.

Local frontier costs a half million dollars to run locally in anything higher than basically ternary.

Okay, that's technically true again, but local mid-tier like Qwen3.8-27B is only a year behind the closed frontier. I'm personally willing to be behind by a year if it gives me mental sovereignty against the big AI companies. They are extremely misaligned with me.

GP's point is about "sending tokens to someone else's computer" versus "keeping the tokens locally". I think model capabilities are secondary.

In May of this year, I was running qwen3.6:35b-a3b on my MacBook (bought in 2024). Obviously not as fast as, say, running a model on Cerebras, but a year ago it wasn't really feasible to have a local model running on my 2024 laptop with vision support. (Concretely, I was passing apartment diagram pictures to Qwen and making it compare different apartments for which ones would feel the most spacious while optimizing for initial moving costs and other factors.)

This was back in May and I wouldn't be surprised if there have been significant improvements since then.

Overall, I think it's fair to compare a workflow like "use llama.cpp locally to upload some pictures and ask questions" to "open the ChatGPT app, upload pictures from your phone, and ask questions". Sure, you can't run a model like GPT-5.4 locally, but the model is mostly an implementation detail here. What a user will care about is: "when I go with the llama.cpp option, am I getting useful information from my conversations?"

Wouldn't the better comparison still be against an AI provider with better privacy controls, especially if that's what someone cares about (even if they don't care about whether they're comparing a 35 billion param model vs a x trillion param model)?

Users generally have no way to verify that a third-party provider, even if they advertise themselves as privacy-focused, will adhere to their own terms. This is similar to the issue of privacy-focused VPN providers that claim to not log user activity (and then end up leaking user activity). You can get proof of ~P, but rarely proof of P, and often times the proof of ~P is due to police raids, data breaches, etc., not something of the provider's volition.

What you can possibly audit is probably data sovereignty. For instance, I would not be surprised if Mistral's customers demand concrete evidence that their data is held within the European Union. But that is a distinct issue from training on input tokens.

Deepseek 4 flash can run locally , and qwen 3.8-next-flash , they are already gpt 5.6 tier.

You haven't tried DeekSeek v4 or GLM 5.3 or Qwen 3.8 Next?

You are missing out a lot.

Try that with Hermes or Opencode or Deekseek Harness , even Qwen 3.8 27b works really well for that kind of that.

I just ask it to install windows as a vm on my linux and install vs Community 2019 on it , and then build a legacy vb 2019 project on it. and sleep

When i wake up :

It installs Qemu , setup a vm , inside vm download and install windows 10 on its own , clicking next next next as needed , typing in things , writing powershell , python scripts , that run automatically after install by baking into CD that includes ssh server , reboot , it logins into ssh , trigger pythons script that continue installation of vs 2019 community , which includes a driver that click the installation steps , installs nuget , install all depedencies and then build the project into exe after i woke up.

That is with 100% pure local AI .

Regarding DeepSeek, which I also like very much, have you tried https://reasonix.io ?

Bot? Care to explain any difference vs DSH / OpenCode / Hermes ?

Notbot! Are you unable to read, or what? Just fkn install it, and see how smooth it integrates?

I've tried the latest Qwen, and without Internet, it still can go into an incoherent loop if you ask for, say, song lyrics. TBH the commercial models might do that too if not for their internal tooling.

This was my thought as well. I have a local model monitoring my finances and personal wiki - things I wouldn't want Claude to touch - and the Qwen 3.5 9b handles it all just perfectly.

I also needed a new device anyway - and having this much system memory to run virtual machines has been amazing.

Am paying subscriptions as well tho lol.

Your last line is what drives the point home, though.

Local isn’t strictly about NOT lab. It’s rapidly becoming apples (though not just macs) to oranges to compare the to.

Which is why the premise is silly. To be underwater it would need to be a real comparison. It’s not, and the claude fartifact doesn’t make it so.

For me, I'm glad they train on my stuff if it improves the model. Hell, I've been using tons of muse-spark-1.3-contributor for this very reason (and because it's a decent model for a bargain basement price)

Also, whatever your doing won't be at the whims of cloud providers; it won't fail because they decided to quantize your customer $ into a shittier model.

Some how, _instability_ has gained valuable currency, so now we all act like the constant change of whatever is actually good for us. FOMO is just like breathing guys. That anxiety induced by tech culture constantly churning is healthy.

In reality, these people churn for their own self worth and nothing else.

> If I am offloading some of my thought processes to a machine

"Offloading thought" sounds a lot better than "outsourcing thought", but the latter is what we're really doing. Offloading implies you thought it first and then gave it to the LLM, but we're only giving it the minimun so it can do most of the work in our place,

I’m very sympathetic to this point of view but I also can’t remotely afford the hardware required to get in the ballpark of Fable.

Agree. As the meme/old-ad goes, "Running it on my own machine? Priceless!"

Some of us get a weird thrill that we can actually do this. Mind-boggling time we live in.

I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret. Claude knows about my interior decorating, questions about light bulbs, curiosity about what the Galactic Empire was even trying to do, unpacking SCOTUS decisions, shoe trees, Fed inflation history, etc.

What part of my brain is contained here? Sure, the conversations have back and forth (some have dozens of exchanges), but, like, that's not the secret to me. I don't think it can replicate me, and even if it could… okay?

Are you worried they're going to target ads? That the government will steal something? What?

Claude Code has information about my home server, but google or DDG would also have the broad strokes (torrents). I don't know. Maybe others are working on more sensitive things at home.

Tristan Buckmaster found out the hard way.

I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret.

The proof to the Navier-Stokes problem.

I'm pretty sure they were sending a prompt for Claude to _find_ the Navier-Stokes proof, using ideas that have been publicly shared before online, but not necessarily used for the problem.

But are you pretty sure or actually sure?

They obviously did not send the proof to Claude.

>> what people are sending to Claude that is so secret

Its the same point used against privacy. What's so secret you are doing that you need privacy. I think in the end, its about privacy and not trusting these model companies with your data. Facebook manipulated people behaviors with all the data they had, no reason AI companies wont someday decide to do that same, and they have far more intimate knowledge.

When it comes to coding, I also don't like the idea of them taking my money and potentially at same time potentially using as dataset generator.

Anthropic's goal is to commoditize intelligence. People who use their brains / intelligence for competitive advantage might not want to contribute training data for that goal.

> Anthropic's goal is to commoditize intelligence.

And Google's original goal was to organize the world's information.

How did that turn out?

> I'm curious what people are sending to Claude that is so secret.

When Claude is used in a professional setting, any or all of:

  Proprietary intellectual property (a.k.a. system code)
  PII[0] of the employee, customers, or both
  HIPAA[1] data known to a system
  Internal communications not meant to be publicized
  Sensitive data, such as SSH keys and the like

Pretty much anything on a machine which uses Anthropic/OpenAI native tools is a candidate to be compromised really.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_a...

Anthropic will sign BAAs. They are HIPAA compliant (we used them.)

I understand people’s hesitation but the business agreements are different. The business risks of misusing HIPAA data is not only being banned from a massive enterprise market (last I checked, there were about 1.2m jobs related to claims billing and adjudication) and significant legal repercussions.

Other companies like AWS also handle HIPAA data. Are we afraid they’re stealing it? I don’t believe it, nor that Anthropic is training on HIPAA data.

OpenAI… I will never trust them.

Are you willing to bet that your lack of imagination for exploitation is precisely that of several multibillion dollar companies?

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