Comment by boshalfoshal
18 hours ago
Imo, this is just the tech version of virtue signaling. Everyone knows local models are objectively just worse than frontier/cloud closed source models for most commodity hardware setups, yet people insist on using it because they want to be contrarian or "stick it to the man."
Your experience is average because it _is_ supposed to be average. The people using local models tradeoff taking the moral/technological high ground vs actually using something high quality to get a job done quickly and with high quality, and largely autonomously. They are ok with subpar output because they will handhold the model more, or the (subpar relative to the frontier) outputs are sufficient for their toy use case while being cheap and accessible, with the added benefit of being able to run it on their private data without sending it to a 3rd party.
Almost no one at any job where software is the main economic output is using a local model to code. If you actually require intelligence to get a hard job done, you should just use a frontier model.
> If you actually require intelligence to get a hard job done, you should just use a frontier model.
Or, you know, your own intelligence.
What I do not understand as an engineer is how our community has gone from believing in open source for controlling destiny, security, etc., from avoiding unnecessary corporate capture (think of all the rants about Swift!), from believing in heterogeneity and portability, to just saying, look, if you're not using the product of one of two loss-making AI unicorns to do all of your work, you're just being a contrarian weirdo who is doing it for performative reasons.
I guess if that is your definition of contrarian — that everyone else is doing it so why aren't we? — then I am.
But in my experience it's not so different to "why aren't you on social media?" — which was an argument from insecurity and the desperate need to fit in.
I personally believe in independent thinking. I have things I want to learn about how all this actually works, I have questions about my own life and future, and I'm not going to simply chuck them away because you or anyone else thinks it's just being contrarian and we shouldn't question the direction everyone is taking. So I am learning the tech with a stack I control, while continuing to do the job I do.
You can do what you want. You're probably right, and I'll be quite happily wrong and continue in my wrongness even though, based on how you characterise it, this kind of independent thinking appears to unsettle you.