Recent post re: AI as utility
Myself, I’m a fan of local LLM / self hosted ML… but if you ever needed a clarion call that a hard pivot is coming (soon) for online/ cloud based AI…Altman et al are making some concerning mouth noises (to say nothing of broader concerns with OAI, Anthropic etc).
Right now, I’m sketching out a plan where my Raspberry Pi (always on, 2-3w) uses a magic packet to wake up my modest AI server (Lenovo P330 with Tesla P4) if/when needed (Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B); no point in chugging down 80-100w, 24/7 for no good reason.
If the trend continues the direction it appears to be (increasing costs, environmental impacts etc) then I’d feel a lot better hosting my own as port of first call and replacing simpler tasks with more traditional programs. YMMV.
Respectfully, that’s not really how local LLMs work.
A GGUF model sitting on my hard drive has no ability to “send content back home” any more than a PDF or a JPEG does. If you’re running something like llama.cpp or Ollama entirely locally, the model weights are just data files.
The real privacy concerns are cloud APIs, telemetry in front-ends, browser extensions, analytics, update services, or accidentally exposing a service to the public internet.
“Self-hosted AI” isn’t one thing. There’s a huge difference between:
Firewalling internet-facing services is good advice. Assuming every local model is secretly uploading prompts is not.