Comment by jdw64
1 day ago
But after the Fable government ban situation, it's hard to trust US AI anymore
Basically, if the US decides to cut off access at any moment, overseas developers relying on the API would suddenly lose connection. Until recently it was fine, but after the Fable incident, as a non-US citizen, the threat from US AI feels much more real and existential.
The big problem with US AI is that they deprecate their models after like a year. If I have a routine business process that works with GPT 9.9 and then next year they release GPT10 and 9.9 isn't available anymore, I really do not want to have to drop everything and verify that 10 behaves close enough to 9.9 for my specific task. With an open model I can just host it on whatever hardware or cloud instance forever. Most software you want to keep up to date to avoid security issues but with an LLM you can update the harness and keep the weights forever.
> I really do not want to have to drop everything and verify that 10 behaves close enough to 9.9 for my specific task
Or worse, you run the evals and 10 is a huge regression from 9.9, and you get stuck with either a project to figure out if you can fix it or knowing the product will drop in quality in a way that's entirely outside your control.
Yes, with open weights you can find another provider offering the same model you already evaluated in your infra. Or event run it yourself if it’s critical and you have the infra/capital. Relying on AI vendors feels pretty risky