Comment by Zaraif13
4 days ago
It's becoming more clear that for big enterprises to really adopt AI, they need to use open models. Especially if they want to own their own intelligence, which they should.
I spent the last 2 days building basic AI agents to automate some mundane supply chain workflows for a large company. Those seemingly boring workflows had bank statements, supplier IDs and other sensitive information.
For me it was all alarm bells, there is no way they can afford to give closed models access to this data. I was compelled to figure out an open model based solution for them, which made me realize that this is probably the only way for enterprises going forward.
I don't get this. It's not like the models are running on their own GPUs.
So if you're running open models on AWS GPUs, you might as well run Claude (which AWS supports, and doesn't share any data with Anthropic).
Same with Azure/OpenAI.
> (which AWS supports, and doesn't share any data with Anthropic)
I want to believe (pinky promises from terms of service don't count)
If you don't believe AWS follows their ToS, you shouldn't use any cloud provider for CPU/data storage/anything else either. That's not a mainstream position in the industry.
Sufficiently large enterprises could get their own GPUs to run the models though.
As long as you don't have "realtime" workloads, owning the GPUs quickly becomes the economical option. The main cost problems is in e.g. chat applications where the workload is spikey, and users expect an near-instant response, for which you need to scale the GPUs to the highest spikes of the workload.
You really don't need to be large. $100k can buy you a lot of compute and it's less than hiring an engineer. With that kind of money you can build an LLM server for a dozen people.
One engineer's salary to accelerate a team of twelve is so cheap you can't afford not to.
Open models on-prem is the future, not a single doubt in my mind.
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> which AWS supports, and doesn't share any data with Anthropic
Ah... oh.
Well, it's a nice thought.
Everybody including companies need their own models, especially considering that llm providers like openAi have no problem siphoning off your data and intelligence by inspecting metadata. and claiming any resulting value as their own.
Why does this necessitate using closed models? I don't see the difference between putting your data on a cloud DB and using a cloud model.
Because the big labs are incredibly untrustworthy. Their leaders are publicly lying constantly.
I don't think you need to trust them if you are running on something like bedrock. Then I think you're trusting AWS or whatever cloud equivalent you want.
I think that's true for Sam, not sure about the others.
https://www.openaifiles.org/ceo-integrity
Same here. We are at a stage where we are evaluating cost/benefit for my enterprise. I am heavily pushing for in house hardware with open models.
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The Enterprise plans with OpenAI and Anthropic include clauses that they won't use your data for training (unlike the 'civilian' plans).
I guess it depends if we believe that or not.
I guess it depends if we believe that or not.
I see the flaw in your clever plan...
If you don't mind me asking: what is your goto for this? "Building Basic AI Agents to automate some mundane supply chain workflow".
good question! i was able to build the agents by using Opencode and used a combo of locally hosted models. Specifically Kimi and Deepseek.
but didnt deploy an agent anywhere. instead we wrote all the code, system prompts, harness, etc locally and just shared those files with the customer.
all the customer had to do is deploy what we provided them on their locally hosted models, essentially just had to add inference. and boom, started working on their systems!
I've actually flipped on this the last few days because of liability.
The big labs are going to be on the hook for rogue behavior by Claude or Sol. Customers will be able to sue for damages and deflect regulators if their customer data is abused or their agents attack external services.
If you use a Chinese OSS model and it goes rogue? Yeah good luck with that, your shop is 100% on the hook.
People - usually suit-wearers - have been making this spurious claim for decades, but it doesn't hold water.
The largest of the finest print reminding you that it's 'sold as is' (or more encompassing variants that might continue '... with no warranty for fitness of purpose') means that liability remains in the lap of the purchaser / consumer / operator.
(This has been a source of immense frustration over my career - where such people have assured me that they have 'recourse' (it's always vaguely described) by spending money on proprietary products & services, rather than opting for functionally equivalent or superior free options.)
I think your third paragraph is implying a distinction (or conflating the difference?) between LLMaaS's and self-hosting publicly available models.
If it's just where it's hosted that provides the legal insulation then things like OpenRouter would give you that. (But again, I suggest that it would not.)
This all depends on the SLA that gets signed.
If a frontier lab is willing to draft an SLA that assumes liability, corporate will pay for it as long as the cost/benefit is in favor of it over insourcing.
Right?
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> The big labs are going to be on the hook for rogue behavior
They haven't so far.
I think the minute a big lab is found to be liable, the whole edifice along with trillions of dollars of investment and VC comes tumbling down. I think that is part of the reason the labs are pushing for more regulation. They can say "We're not liable, we complied with all of the regulations". The actions of multi-billion parameter models trained on data harvested from millions of Internet users over the years can never really be understood - if a business is found to be liable for that, then nobody would ever operate in that space.
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Enterprises have barely deployed empowered agents yet. The models capable of doing this have only been available for months. Give it a little time, it's coming.
... when are large companies on the hook for anything, ever?
I mean, hypothetically, yes, but class-action lawsuits get settled out-of-court, the lawyers get paid in Ferrari-multiples, the plaintiffs get paid in McDonalds coupons that expire in two weeks.
Slaps-on-the-wrist are written into the laws; a million-dollar fine is existential for a small company, and likely not even a line-item at Anthropic.
I know this is the risk management answer, but when you're the featured story on the news because of a data breach, noone hears "butbutbut it's Anthropic/OpenAI/whoevers fault...". So it's a balance between "there's someone we can sue" and "what's our reputation worth".
It actually does help a lot to be able to say your OpenAI agent was the fault. People recognize the name. The press doesn't want to write about Better Home Life Insurance agents running loose on the internet, nobody cares.
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