Yes, this is where it's at for me. LLM's are cool and I can see them as progress, but I really dislike that they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.
Use local OSS models then? They aren’t as good and you need beefy hardware (either Apple silicon or nvidia GPUs). But they are totally workable, and you avoid your dislikes directly.
$3000 is not that much for hardware (like a refurbished MBP Max with decent amount of RAM), and you'd be surprised how much more useful a thing that is slightly worse than the expensive thing is when you don't have anxiety about token usage.
Ok, from that perspective we are still a few years from when a college student in Portugal can run local OSS models on their own hardware...but we aren't a few decades away from that, at least.
> they're controlled by huge corporations and cost a significant amount of money to use.
is there anything you use that isn't? like laptop on which you work, software that you use to browse the internet, read the email... I've heard similar comment like yours before and I am not sure I understand it given everything else - why does this matter for LLMs and not the phone you use etc etc?
