Comment by fedpost
11 hours ago
We desperately need to keep local models competitive with the hyper scalers. I won't want to be beholden to them and their whims forever. With anthropic now restricting game reverse engineering I think we're about to cross a Rubicon of censorship.
The nice thing is that current local modes don't go away. The weights are out. Qwen 27b and deepseek are already very useful. Hardware will keep getting stronger so after the current memory crisis you can run them more cheaply.
Of course the proprietary models will continue to improve and we have no guarantee that there will be new open models. But for coding, the local models are already good enough for a vast amount of use cases, if you are an experienced developer yourself and can guide it.
I think the future should be efficient quantization which can make model with the same level as Qwen 3.8 27b now accessible from our laptop.
This is mostly a memory bandwidth issue. Qwen 3.8 27b and the related Bonsai 2 27B run on my M5 Max laptop with 36GB of ram. It’s a little slow due to my specific model having lower memory bandwidth than higher end models with more ram and cores. MoE models perform better here and expert streaming engines can allow larger than memory models to run.
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The future is already here :)
These 3bit ISTA quants of qwen are supposed to be 95% as accurate as the full model and runs moothly on laptops:
https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF
There are multiple independent tests of this on YouTube.
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Its possible (though very hard to do well, and needs a fair bit of compute) to improve the local models we have, too. Continued training is possible as time goes on.
>The nice thing is that current local modes don't go away.
Given pace of advance I'm not convinced this is a winning strategy. The models of today (open or not) are way smarter than those of a year ago.
...so we really do need open models to keep pace, not just be statically competitive at a given point in time
Even if Deepseek v4.1 is the last open source LLM I have access to, I would be perfectly fine with that. My secret is that I have this relatively unknown technique for solving problems where I use this quantum engine that developed from just atoms over 4.54 billion years into the most sophisticated machine in the known universe. It's a frontier model that every human has access too, actually.
So when I really want to solve a problem, I just think on it. And when I need something to iterate through the things I thought of quickly, I use deepseek.
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I’m all for local models and getting away from Anthropic/OAI but Qwen 27B might as well be a horse drawn carriage compared to a 2026 Porsche. Like, I guess it’s useful if you had nothing better but acting like it’s comparable to anything the frontier models have is just disingenuous.
disagree, it’s absolutely comparable. but an m5 max is where it shines. and there are 50 flags to finetune with llama server before you get it right. i do prefer llama server over mlx currently on mac as well.
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But it's all for the good of humanity, so how can you complain?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Gc35vDLK2u5nBxP/...
> I won't want to be beholden to them and their whims forever.
Who's keeping you beholden to them now?
>Anthropic restricting game reverse engineering
Which is literally the coolest thing to come out of this...
Did they get a letter from Nintendo's legal team or something?
Maybe it was EA from my shenanigans :) https://dirtforever.net
It doesn’t matter, right? The open models should be capable of reversing anything prior to 2005, no?
Wait and see, I give it fairly high odds everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface at some point in the future. The main barrier to wider spread adoption of this right now is that very few people have the legit on-prem hardware resources/budget to run something like an abliterated Q8 of deepseek v4.1 flash 1017 or mimo 2.6 or equivalent in size locally.
Doubt it. Even if HF drops them, it will not be hard for someone to move it to something like a decentralized torrent site dedicated to open source models.
Banning them would just invite competition which is why I think HF is holding out as long as they legally can.
Recently, HuggingFace has already taken down multiple models abliterated for cyber and with such descriptions, at their own initiative.
Example: https://huggingface.co/audnai/penclaw-GLM-5.3-abliterated-fo...
Previously, I recall HuggingFace only took models down if someone complained / sent a DMCA or cease and desist.
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>everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface at some point in the future.
Unlikely given how trivial it is to DIY this (I think...haven't myself but from afar it seems within avg hn crowd reach)
Think about it this way: if new open source models come restricted where they refuse to run tasks related to abliteration, then even if public utility programs exist, it will already add a lot of friction to how many people will be capable of doing it. Now, if unverified models become outlawed and will move to more obscure hosting sites, that will add friction as well.
Especially as people grow more dependent on agents doing all of their computer work.
Yes, it'll likely just result in some people standing up a more dedicated purpose community hosting site of abliterated/uncensored open weight GGUF files. In a theoretical scenario where HF bans abliterated/uncensored models I could very well see the same people who are producing those now simply moving the location they upload stuff to.
To use an old analogy, it's not rocket science:
https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic
I was able to remove much of the CCP censorship from Qwen 3.8 27B for around $90 using a LoRA. I multiplied the LoRA in permanently and listed it on HuggingFace.
The cost was approximately $80 for generating synthetic data and $10 to create and integrate the LoRA.
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> I give it fairly high odds everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface at some point in the future
This is the kind of bet where I would take the opposite position without hesitation.
The only thing I could see them removing would be models that are specifically trained to do bad things, like a model trained to produce illicit underage image content. And I would be totally understanding of and encouraging of that, even if it makes the free speech absolutists unhappy.
I think the uncensored and abliterated models are more hype than actual threat. The journalists and politicians are too busy going after the AI labs every time someone does something bad and the police can find ChatGPT logs before it. I doubt we’re going to find a situation where someone was running local models and also keeping logs of everything and also commits a crime and also the journalists find it and also they make a story that catches on and so on.
It’s such a niche thing it’s just not a priority. There are some open LLM people who are treating it like a crisis before it happens, but come on. It’s the internet. We can download gigabytes of pirated TV shows despite that industry and lawmakers working hard to stop it for decades. If open models got banned somehow, you’d be able to download them the same way.
I didn't say they won't immediately move somewhere else or still be readily available. Just be taken off HF. It'll be a futile game of whack a mole for anyone trying ot stop it. The new corporate overlords at some point will face pressure. The 72GB 2160p HEVC copy of Apocalypse Now sitting on my home theatre file server which came from a well seeded torrent does indeed say that large file sizes of things that $bigcorp don't like will continue to be easily available.
Applying Heretic to your model weights is a very straightforward thing, though.
Hugging Face just hosts the models. Any hypothetical censorship on their end wouldn't stop you from running the original model provided directly by the builder.
> everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface
... you do know you can download from huggingface and make your own copy, right? And even if you couldn't, you could run heretic (or whatever approach they used) yourself on the official image. It's all just a well-understood process. A decent abliteration run on DS 4.1 flash will probably cost you about $25k.
They're not small but they're hardly out of reach. I have backups on my home NAS.
> very few people have the legit on-prem hardware resources/budget to run something like an abliterated Q8 of deepseek v4.1 flash 1017
It's something like $300-400/day for the raw hardware on RunPod, a little more on AWS. Not for home users, sure, but for a business wanting to eg check its security against the best of what attackers might bring, that's nothing. And it will go down.
The main barrier to wider spread adoption of this right now is that very few people have the legit on-prem hardware resources/budget to run something like an abliterated Q8 of deepseek v4.1 flash 1017
Not as bad as you might think. This costs about as much as a decent new car nowadays.
The abliterated 1017 release I've seen is crazy good.
I guess it depends if we're talking about decent new car at $40,000 or $95,000? I've seen lots of people claiming they're running v4.1 flash 1017 on local hardware but then it turns out it's something like the unsloth Q2 XXS or similar size. The Q8 is 508GB so assuming for a moment we're not running it on a Mac, we're looking at a cost of five or six 96GB GPUs to load the whole thing with a good sized full context and KV cache.
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> new car
...which is still tooo much for most people to spend on "AI hardware"....
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Yes it is extremely aggravating that Claude will often raise copyright objections even when doing something like putting images in a report for personal use. The AI companies are the most blatant copyright abusers in history.
> We
who is "we" exactly? because the vast majority of us (pretty much everybody except people working at at hyperscalers that are not the usual hyperscalers) can essentially do nothing.
I got banned from the Hermes discord today not gonna lie.
https://gnosh.ai/head-to-head.html
Did we ever get back to 16GB feasibility?
AFAIK the timeline was:
Any chance a good model will ever be seen in a consumer GPU again?
Sonnet 5.5 refused to implement code using selenium/firefox to scrape a webpage on my laptop after we got a 403 from a cloud-based IP. I made that clanker generate datasets for the rest of the week to use up my weekly usage that would have been wasted.