If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't have a massively powerful local machine to run local models, what are the best options?
Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident about what's up with the other companies.
E.g. i'm very outspoken about my preferences for open llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I'm very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.
However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI because it works better than what I tried so far for my use case.
That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS operator that serves my needs as well without major change investment, I will switch.
For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as such.
Who’s chill? Groq is chill
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/09/terrorists_...
You actually can't fault llama either, as a standalone product. However it's still in Zuck Paradise
Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource right access, etc.
I am not saying you’re wrong, but please educate me why is this form of corruption/cronyism is unique to fascism?
> An important aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigism,[35] meaning an economy where the government often subsidizes favorable companies and exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, fascist economies were based on private property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.
The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can snowball because people at the top of so many powerful structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a positive spin by giving more access to organizations that support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside the room.
They then get access, get special treatment, and come out singing the praises of [errr.. what's his name again?]
Start looking and you’ll find powerful forces shaping history. Sacking a city is extremely profitable throughout antiquity, which then pushes cities to have defensive capabilities which then…
In the Bronze Age trade was critical as having Copper ore alone wasn’t nearly as useful as having copper and access to tin. Iron however is found basically everywhere as where trees.
Such forces don’t guarantee outcomes, but they have massive influence.
This can be bad without invoking godwin's law.
That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's just not a sufficient attribute to define snakes).
https://www.morphmarket.com/morphpedia/corn-snakes/scaleless...
That's a strange definition of "correlation" that you're using.
Imagine there are three equally sized groups of animals: scaly snakes, scaly fish, and scaleless fish. So we have three data points (1,1) (0,1) (0,0) with probability 1/3 each. Some calculations later, the correlation between snake and scaly is 1/2.
I am noting that the logical argument does not hold in the provided definition. If “some” attributes hold in a definition, you are expanding the definitional set, not reducing it, and thus creating a low-res definition. That is why I said: ‘this is a poor definition.’
---
The term emerged in the post-World War II era to describe the economic policies of France which included substantial state-directed investment, the use of indicative economic planning to supplement the market mechanism and the establishment of state enterprises in strategic domestic sectors. It coincided with both the period of substantial economic and demographic growth, known as the Trente Glorieuses which followed the war, and the slowdown beginning with the 1973 oil crisis.
The term has subsequently been used to classify other economies that pursued similar policies, such as Canada, Japan, the East Asian tiger economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; and more recently the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after its economic reforms,[2] Malaysia, Indonesia[3][4] and India before the opening of its economy in 1991.[5][6][7]
---
It's a pretty normal word in British English, tbh.
Maybe it's because we do French at school.
All real world countries have some of this, but in fascism it’s really overt and dialed up and for the private sector participation is not optional. If you don’t toe the line you are ruined or worse. If you do play along you can get very very rich, but only if you remember who is in charge.
“Public private partnership” style ventures are kind of fascism lite, and they always worried me for that reason. It’s not an open bid but a more explicit relationship. If you look back at Musk’s career in particular there are ominous signs of where this was going.
This is pretty common fascist practice that is used all over Europe and in any left-leaning countries, when with regulations governments make doing business on large scale impossible, and then give largest players exemptions, subsidies and so on. Governments gain enormous leverage to ensure corporate loyalty, silence dissenters and combat opposition, while the biggest players secure their place at the top and gain protection from competitors.
So the plan was push regulations and then dominate over the competitors with exemptions from those regulations. But fascists loose the election, regulations threaten to start working in a non-discriminatory manner, and this will simply hinder business.
You mean like Germany has done?
Or his lackeys have anyway. I’m unwilling to believe the man has ever read a book.
Donald Trump, Jr. is in charge. Vivek Ramaswamy and Peter Thiel are involved. Azoria ETF and 1789 Capital are funds designed to fund MAGA-friendly companies.
But this may be a sideshow. The main show is US CEOs sucking up to Trump, as happened at the inauguration. That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched." "Loyalty is what Putin values above all else.” Three of the oligarchs didn't do that. Berezovsky was forced out of Russia. Gusinsky was arrested, and later fled the country. Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time (Yukos Oil), was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in jail. He got out in 2013 and left for the UK. Interestingly, he was seen at Trump's inauguration.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/13/maga-influ...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-oligarchs-rich-ukrai...
> Khodorkovsky [...] was arrested in 2003
Something doesn't square here
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how...
If there’s anyone to copy it’s China in industry and maybe elements of Western Europe and Japan in some civic areas.
Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much less church attendance.
I. Do. Not. Get. The Russia fetish.
It's not a Russia fetish. It's a Strongman fetish.
>Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much less church attendance.
In the case of OpenAI, were I to guess, they'll likely do things like push for stronger copyright laws or laws against web scraping. Things that look harmless but ultimately will squash new competitors in the AI market. Now that they already have a bunch of the data to train their models, they'll be happy to make it a little harder for them to get new data if it means they don't have to compete.
It can be through keeping regulation to be mild or look the other way, but as often to put up high cost/high compliance burdens in place to pull up the drawbridge for new entrants.
A great example - people forget what life was like pre-Snowden. The authoritarians were out in locked ranks pretending that the US spies were tolerable - it made any sort of organisation to resist impossible. Then one day the parameters of the debate get changed and suddenly everyone is forced to agree that encryption everywhere is the only approach that makes sense.
I'm not saying LLMs are useless, but I do not understand your use case.
Very doubtful: The current "AI" hype craze centers on LLMs, and they don't do math.
If anything they capabilities favor the other side, to obfuscate and protect falsehoods.
Unless they delete the Internet Archive of such info?
>>*and they don't do math.*
Have you ever considered the "Math of Politics"
Yeah - they do that just fine
((FYI -- Politics == Propaganda.. the first iteration of models is CHAT == Politics...
They do plenty of "Maths"))
The most-charitable paraphrase I can come up with it: "Bad people can't use LLMs to hide facts, hiding facts means removing source-materials. Math doesn't matter for politics which are mainly propaganda."
However even that just creates contradictions:
1. If math and logic are not important for uncovering wrongdoing, why was "tabulation" cited as an important feature in the first post?
2. If propaganda dominates other factors, why would the (continued) existence of the Internet Archive be meaningful? People will simply be given an explanation (or veneer of settled agreement) so that they never bother looking for source-material. (Or in the case of IA, copies of source material.)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecu...
---
I am saying that AI can be used very beneficially to do a calculated dissection of the Truth of our Political structure as a Nation and how it truly impacts an Individual/Unit (person, family) -- and do so where we can get discernible metrics and utilize AIs understanding of the vast matrices of such inputs to provide meaningful outputs. Simple.
EDIT @MegaButts;
>>Why is this better than AI
People tend to think of AI in two disjointed categories; [AI THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING] v [AI THAT CAN EASILY SIFT THROUGH VAST EVERYTHING DATA GIVEN TO IT AND BE COMMANDED TO OUTPUT FINDINGS THAT A HUMAN COULDN'T DO ALONE]
---
Which do you think I refer to?
AI is transformative (pun intended) -- in that it allows for very complex questions to be asked of our very complex civilization in a simple and EveryMan hands...
Not LLMs: They might reveal how people are popularly writing about the political structure of the nation.
If that were the same as "truth", we wouldn't need any kind of software analysis in the first place.
Truth: The real meaning behind the words which may or may not be interpreted by the receiver in A/B/N meaning
Truth: The actual structure of the nature of whats being presented.
When you can manipulate an individual's PERCEIVED reception of TRUTH between such, you can control reality... now do that at scale..
Period.
If you dont understand the benefit of an AI augmenting the speed and depth of ingestion of Domain Context into a human mind.. then... go play with chalk.||I as a smart Human operate on lots of data... and AI and such has allowed me to consume such.
The most important medicines in the world are MEMORY retention...
It s youd like a conspiracy, eat too much aluminum to give you alzheimers asap so your generation forgets... (based though. hope you undestand what I am saying)
And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.
They don't care about that if they get a regulatory moat around them.
[1] https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/peo...
I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+ cars.
[0] https://languagesystems.edu/history-of-idioms-to-be-in-black...
OpenAI rejected a 97.4B USD buyout in February 2025 and won’t be absorbed anytime soon: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/technology/openai-elon-mu...
There's a reason they're sweating the data issue. As much as it sucks to say it, Google/Bing/Meta/etc. all have a shitton of proprietary human-generated data they can work with, train on, fine tune with, etc. OpenAI _needs_ more human generated data desperately to keep going.
No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull them away from the competition, ha).
Sure.
The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.
Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and support that you're going to need what I described. What's the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.
OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this point.
Microsoft has a mote. Oai does not.
OpenAI copilot, not microsoft copilot, actually looks like a stronger product and they're going full force after the enterprise market as we speak. We're setting a demo in motion with them next month to give it a go.
We'll have to wait for the first one to crack Powerpoint, that'll be the gamechanger.
That's exactly what has been happening:
Ask HN: Why is OpenAI pushing for regulation so much - 2023
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045397