Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic

verdverm

I'm concerned our media / political ecosystem is too dysfunctional to not repeat the mistakes we made with Big Tech & Social again with Big Ai. I find it curious how split the dev community is, and especially HN, is on this, which has long been skeptical and speaking truth to power. I'm surprised at how quickly the public switched to abdicating to Big Ai's claims and recommendations. These people do not have our interests in mind. Great piece, thanks for putting some of my thoughts in organically sourced words.

povik

> ChatGPT and Claude will never be private > These companies only offer closed versions of their powerful models (despite the word "open" in "OpenAI"). You pay them for chat and/or API access, and they are allowed to look at everything you do. How should I reconcile this claim with 'Google Vertex' and 'Amazon Bedrock' being offered as providers with zero data retention on https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-5.5#providers ?

serf

"but my vibes-based opinion from using it is that it's basically on par with Claude Opus 5.5 for software engineering." is an outright lie that's qualified by a "well in my opinion.." unless you're comparing the most extreme specific harnesses to claude code that's just false. ..and I have a lot of disdain toward Anthropic , & I think GLM is great (although too expensive outside the z plans), but it's just wrong by every scorable metric.

qarl

Well... except that both companies offer insane subscription benefits to individuals. So a hosted open weights model still comes out more expensive. I'd move in a second if it weren't so. But it looks like it will be about 5X more expensive for me. So.

stillpointlab

> American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God, that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI, and that they believe with religious fervor that they're the only ones smart enough to safely control it I like hyperbole as much as the next guy. And I'm cynical by nature. But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab. And the fact the author goes on to say that they "already knew this" just points to confirmation bias. The rest of the article is actually pretty decent and encourages people to investigate and run open weight models. That is a totally reasonable position that I don't think requires the heavy-handed in-group signal that precedes it.

finnjohnsen2

I switched to GLM on 5.2 and I am happy to be off the two evil frontier providers. But now I have two new issues: 1. I have fomo from not being face-in the bleeding edge of things. 2. I am ambivalent about z.ai. China -based company is problematic, but they should get my money since they do good for the world. Switching to Mistral for GLM makes my problem inverse since the money doesnt go exactly to to the right place but I trust a french company. Lets hope the near future resolves our need for personal VRAM and ultimately full self hosting. Coding must be free again. This is the way.

hmokiguess

It's hard to do that when private equity says yes and shoves it down users. At my own stuff I can do what I want, at work I have no agency and it's not looking like anything is changing soon.

BeetleB

If you don't trust OpenAI and Anthropic not to abide by their own Privacy Policy, you really should not trust OpenCode Go. The latter (last time I checked) is very opaque. Why don't they reveal who the backend providers are?

jrflo

If you don't trust OpenAI and Anthropic to follow their own policies, how do you decide what companies to trust? Vibes?

drivingmenuts

So that leaves, what? Muse? Grok? Muse is run by Zuckerberg, which is a red flag. Grok is run by a racist. I guess I could go with the Chinese models - I'm not working on anything dangerous.

enraged_camel

>> I've been mostly using GLM-5.3 on low reasoning, with great results. Bro come on.

DerDerDaIst

In my MacStudios, I trust. seriously: there's a multitude of reasons not to get hooked on Frontier Labs. Unclear cost. Will they use your data against you? will their models work consistently over time? Will they be there at all? Their datacenters harm everyone living arround them. Their 'controversial' owners and bosses. ....

nphardon

Is a special hardware setup required to run open weight models? It's not clear to me from the article. Also, what does paying for inference mean? I thought the inference step happened during the training of the models, and that by the time I am interfacing with an LLM all the inference has been long done.

segmondy

Running local is not as difficult as it is, if the will is there and you are resourceful, you can do it.

pelican0

I asked GPT-6-Luna to summarize the article, and it "helpfully" included a third paragraph to point out that the author is opinionated and not neutral in his judgement. Good times.

methou

> Their models have strict guardrails, This is what bothers me most, and it's getting increasingly frustrating. With the recent development of PS4/5 emulation and game porting, it will only get worse (back snatching or lawsuits).