Comment by segmondy
6 hours ago
My local model never says no. I never get banned. If I want to do security stuff, reverse engine, there it goes! Do I wanna chat about politics? No problem! Do I want it to analyze medical stuff? I don't get to hear that it's not a doctor and I should call 911. Do I want to explore legal docs, no problem! There are lots of things that cloud models will say no to! I read that don't even agree to help with advanced biology and chemistry topic much. I also never run out of tokens, no 5 hr limit. I can run it 24/7. I don't run out of tokens. I can run 16 sub agents at the same time, non stop! 1-4 billion tokens a month? No problem. Any agent harness I want! No restrictions. Privacy all day. My own true system prompt, not something someone has determined, no filters. Furthermore, there are many open weight cloud models that don't have equivalent online. For a while before cloud models got good at math, the best model at math was DeepSeekv2 Math and there was no API. The only way to use it was to run local. All sorts of audio models, image/video models, etc. No multiple subscription needed. Private UI for my family, kids included (I can guard what kids infer). Got a friend that really needs some tokens? I give em access through private VPN. Telling someone that they are paying for decades of Claude for local AI is like telling someone they are paying for decades of public transport when they buy a car. Sure, you are right, but ...
> My local model never says no.
> I don't get to hear that it's not a doctor and I should call 911.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Awards
Also no political censorship, and it doesn’t report you to the police when it suspects you did something illegal. That really happened, by the way.
Now I want a local LLM server :( $25k is just so much money.
If you already have a machine, throwing an r9700 in it is one of the cheapest ways to get qwen3.8 27B Q6 with 100k+ context working.
Sadly, the r9700 has gone up in price, but it's still the cheapest route. I use It on an old x99 Linux desktop and it achieves 50 tps decode and 1000+ tps prefill.
I'm building a local LLM server myself. For about 8k€ you can have 170tps, ~6000 prefill.
A lot more with Haiku equivalents (Qwen3.8 27B) or gemini. It's not frontier, but not that far away.
>and it doesn’t report you to the police when it suspects you did something illegal
This is an alignment issue. OpenClaw with a local LLM with an email you setup for it could contact the police.
MacBooks with large RAM and optimized for local models should be Apple's medium term goal.
It's a good first step. They're not great but they kind of work for many tasks. I think the small models can be useful in context-specific tasks but the friction is high right now because the user is forced to determine whether Siri is good enough, or a better LLM is required per task. Ideally Siri would be smart enough to intelligently route. Apple claims that's how it works but even their cloud processing is far behind frontier models.
Worryingly, they're taking a walled garden approach, and they don't want to expose user data to competitors. After the monumental failure of Siri over more than a decade, I don't trust Apple to execute competently on AI.
isn't it the same using the same model you host locally but through a cloud provider? does the $ math favour a local setup then?
Exactly, that's the spirit. I pool the resources with some friends as well.
> My local model never says no. I never get banned.
So much this. Plus everything else you mentioned. The freedom and control is real.
>I don't get to hear that it's not a doctor and I should call 911.
Local models can do this and with tool use they can even call emergency services for you on your behalf.
I think both of y’all glossed over the $25k of it all pretty quickly. This isn’t remotely an option for anyone.
AnyONE. But if you got some friends, and they got friends, then that $25k becomes smaller and stomachable. My favorite rumor out of LA is groups of friends with a Lamborghini Urus that they timeshare. No idea if it's true, but if car people can get together to buy/lease a car that's MSRP is $345k, I think $25k should be an option for anyone with friends. (Hypothetically. I've read a lot about this friend thing on the Internet!)
Its a drop in the bucket for many businesses though.