Fuck AI

Open models, running on consumer hardware, will probably be really subpar for a very long time because the AI big boys are heavily subsidizing their AIs with massive models running on massive compute farms in massive datacenters. They are subsidizing these things using your environment, your electricity dollars, your tax dollars and your retirement fund's dollars to subsidize it with, since they're all losing money all the time.

But they're not going to do that forever (and you can't afford to do this forever either), but that's okay because they just want to get you onboard. It's a trap, and you can play around with that alluring trap if you want, but they're going to make it really easy to fall in when you do.

Once they've got you in the trap, they're eventually going to tighten the screws, lock you into their ecosystem (if they haven't already) and start extracting money from you directly. That's coming, they'll lock it down and enshittify until you pay them, and then they'll enshittify that until you pay them more, because eventually they have to reach the real economics of providing these AI models, and then they have to start actually turning a profit, and you can't even imagine how far they'll have to eventually go to get to that point, you might as well just set your wallet on fire now.

So, if you're expecting, open, free, local models to compete directly with that, you aren't understanding their business model. The results that big AI providers are giving you are an absolute illusion, built out of a collage of countless different lies and thefts, those results won't continue they way they are now, they can't continue, they're not economically viable to continue. They're only that good so they can lure you into the trap.

Open models, on the other hand, operate in the concrete reality of the here and now. What they're giving you is the real quality of existing models on sensible contemporary hardware using the real economics of providing these things. If you find that underwhelming, well, maybe it is, but it doesn't mean the lies of big AI are real or ever will be. You can try and take advantage of the constant, delightful lies they're currently showing you while you still can, but chances are they'll end up taking advantage of you instead, because that's what their goal is.