Re:Anthropic IPO Buyers See Valuation as Low as $1.1T
by dofm on Friday November 06, 2026 @08:14PM
(#50400649)
> 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 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.
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?"
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 outputs are totally sufficient for their toy use case while being cheap.
Almost no one at any job where software is the main economic output is using a local model to code.