“Using free Chinese models that you can run locally and offline is a security risk. People and businesses high on AI should be forced to use our expensive cloud-based models that funnel all their data through our servers and can be turned off or price-hiked by us at any moment!”
And now, everyone!
“IN THE LAND OF THE FREE
AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE!”
That’s the thing: if constituents only get their info (or opinions) through chatbots…
…by axing or redirecting (read: embezzling) funds once spent on actual science?
So… Here’s another resource that will become available again once the bubble pops?
they forgot what actual competition is
That’s an accurate diagnosis. U.S. big tech companies all follow the same playbook: use VC to buy off or price-dump to death all of your competitors. Become a monopoly. Then enshittify and extract the maximum amount of wealth from b2b and retail customers by increasing the cost of your services.
Any sane country would have drowned these companies in anti-trust cases and carved them up. But political leadership at the time was too high on neoliberal free market ideology and the fairytales these self-styled “tech geniuses” wove around themselves. Now big tech has effectively bought off the U.S. government.
They’re in for a nasty surprise when they find out that the U.S. is not the world, and the rest of the world can do pretty well without the U.S…
Good luck expanding that to the rest of the world which is just discovering that, while not perfect, China’s open weights models are
a) good enough for 95% or all companies out there
b) a lot cheaper, also because they’re
c) self-hostable, meaning: they’ll always be available, unlike U.S. cloud AI which you’ll be cut off from whenever Diaper Donnie feels it’s time for yet another bribe.
It feels like nitpicking, but there’s a relevant difference here. If you can only access the weights (and not the training data and the learning algorithms used), it’s hard to get (say) a Chinese model to freely talk about Tiananmen Square Massacre. (Just tried it locally on Deepseek R1; it’s doable, but takes some prompt hacking.) The models may be freely available, but there’s bias and censorship baked into them.
It’s nice that these things are open source
Well, they do have that fruit basket, so…
Like showing up to the bank heist in a neon pink monster truck.
Nextcloud + Calendar w/ tasks support or Joplin (Server) can both do this.
Leave the poor Russian bot alone. Shilling fossile tech and vilifying Europe for responding to Russia’s aggression is hard enough as it is.
Qwant is nice, but it keeps blocking my VPN and locks me out if I happen to use a non-European exit node (“We’re not offering Qwant in your region”). And I’m not pulling down my mask for a fucking search engine.
If you’re willing to put up with Duckduckgo but hate AI search, there’s https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
Read: “I should have won bigly, but I didn’t. But my ego tells me I can’t be wrong, so the game must have been rigged.”
Boy, does that remind me of someone…
Fuck this guy, the other guy, and fuck their corrupt moneymaking schemes.