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This is gross

It feels like we’ve been in the golden age and the window is coming to a close

Let the enshitification begin, I guess


How do you expect the spend & COGS for free LLM inference to be funded? For users who don't want to pay, or maybe can't pay?

Perhaps it’s a glib and easy thing to say, but after a teaser period, I would simply not offer free LLM inference. Agreeing to serve ads just completely re-aligns your interests away from providing the best possible user experience to something else entirely.

From things like defense/private contracts

e.g. colleges pay for institutional subscriptions


The average person doesn't benefit from defense contracts ... Like ever.

The average person is slightly more female than male and has 2.1 children, but they do benefit from defense contracts since it makes up a small percentage of their salary.

You are a fun person. We should be friends

It has begun ever since they nerfed chatgpt4 before releasing 4o

In the past month local models have been ramping up in major way meanwhile the namesake providers have upped prices, went offline randomly, and started doing slimier and slimier things.

I really think the future is local compute. Or at least self hosted models.


The hosted ones still have the advantage of being able to search the internet for live info rather than being limited to a knowledge cut off date.

I’m not sure why a model needs to be hosted in order to make network calls?

Is there a library of good tools for LLMs to call? I have to imagine the bot-detection avoidance mechanisms are a major engineering effort and not likely to work out of the box with a simple harness and random local LLM.

Even the hosted ones are blocked from searching certain sites, for example Claude is banned from searching Reddit:

`Error: "The following domains are not accessible to our user agent: ['reddit.com']."`


Tavily, Exa, Firecrawl, Perplexity, and Linkup are all tools for agents to search the web.

I’ve been building a harness the past few months and supports them all out of the box with an API key.


Kagi also has an API. People who hate ads are probably the same folk that should be paying for Kagi. That's the sane alternative world where companies respect their users.

Oh, you got me so excited. I've had a Kagi sub for 3 years, but their API is still in closed beta. I guess I could (and should reach out and ask for access).

be warned though:

firecrawl: "if you post content or intellectual property within the Services or give us Feedback about the Services, you hereby grant to us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, translate and distribute any content that you submit in any form [...] You also grant to us the right to sub-license these rights"

exa: "Query Data is used to improve our products and technology, including by training and fine-tuning models that power our Services"

perplexity: "Perplexity may retain, copy, distribute and otherwise use Search Data for its lawful business purposes, including the improvement and development of products and services."

linkup: "Client grants Linkup a worldwide right to use, reproduce and modify the Client Data, including prompts, for the purposes of providing, maintaining, developing, training"

tavily: "we may use certain portions of your query data to improve our responses to future queries"..."We may share your query data with third-party search index providers (e.g., Google)"


If your volume is low enough, it should be pretty fine. It can just piggy back onto your personal browser cookies for Cloudflare.

That's not how it works. Whether local or hosted, every modern model has a cutoff date for its training data, and can be leveraged by agents / harnesses / tools to fetch context from the internet or wherever.

Local ones that support tool use can do the same

You can do that locally too!

What's the rough equivalent of a local model? Are we talking GPT-4?

Qwen 3.6 which was released this month is a large but still smaller model. Supposedly it's at about sonnet level when configured correctly. It can be run on commodity hardware without purchasing a data center. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1so1533/qwen36_...

Then there are middle size ones which require multiple gpus which are like gpts latest flagships.

Then there is kimi 2.6 which is a monster that is beating opus in some benchmarks. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sr8p49/kimi_k2...

It's basically whatever you can afford. Any trash heap laptop can run code auto complete models locally no problem. The rest require some level of investment, an idle gaming pc, or a serious investment


Depends on your VRAM or "unified" memory for how smart it is, and CPU/GPU for how quick it is.

128GB of RAM? Sure, the early to mid 4s releases, except maybe 4o. And on an M5 Max, about the same speed.

I wouldn't really bother under 64GB (meaning 32GB or less) except for entertainment value (chats, summaries, tasky read-only agent things).


GLM 5.1 and DeepSeek 4 are acceptable, but the cost of hardware and energy cost that depending on your use case you may as well purchase a Tokens. They get useless and stupid rapidilty if you quant enough to run on single 16-24GB GPU style.

The arc of the technological universe is short, but it bends toward enshitification.

You could just always buy a cheap one on Amazon and then make a real investment if you like

If you look at the past 3-4 decades, China has just played their cards so well

If/when they overtake the US, all things aside, they deserve it. There is no world where the US overtakes China but there’s a world where China overtakes the US. Best outcome for the US atm is parity.

Just remarkable the things they’ve accomplished in the time they’ve accomplished them.


Always makes me wonder how people use their machine when I read comments like this

I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software

The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch

It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out

The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond

So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?


Sure, I can tell you one thing that's different right now: I use third-party software to get a three-finger middle click. If Apple's operating system weren't missing basic features like the ability to middle click via the trackpad, I wouldn't have to do that and maybe wouldn't have this problem.

The difference is you can make full use of Google without logging in

Even with a throw away, no chance I use OpenAI now - if/when Anthropocene does this I’ll be in a tough spot


you can use chatgpt without an account, just not all of it

and you can't make full use of Google without an account. for example, you need an account to upload to YouTube, manage your website in search, place ads, opt out of data usage. the list goes on


None of those examples are "run an internet search".

I don't understand. you can talk to chatgpt without an account, what's the difference?

both are a limited subset of what the companies offer, available for free


And you can also search on google with an account, and your queries are stored for you to see right? I'm pretty sure I can see a history of my searches.

This was a great comment, you challenged them but in a reasonable way and with really good questions

I wish public discourse were more this way - if someone is arguing in good faith, actually answering what you asked moves the conversation forward, it’s just on the person to give you a serious answer


Wow that was your takeaway?

> “2025 was the year when AI really started being useful for many different tasks,” said Terence Tao

I think I’ll go out on a limb and agree with Terrence Tao, I think the dude is well known in the math community, or something


> go out on a limb and agree with Terrence Tao

Is AI his specialty?

> I think the dude is well known in the math community, or something

I believe this is called "appeal to authority." Which is why, instead of disagreeing with him, I suggested a more cogent endpoint that could be used to establish the facts the article's title suggests.


I think he means useful for mathematicians getting paid shilling for AI models


If anything his simping for AI models makes me more suspect of him than I ever was because my own eyes show me their limits.


Any chance your eyes are wrong? Or only people who disagree with you are.


If I had to wager a lazy, armchair guess, I think it forces it to think harder/longer

The answer is probably more straightforward than we think, e.g. “the user thinks I can do this so I better make sure I didn’t miss anything”


I had a similar thought, though not as extreme, the second they started nerfing and filtering models

Their intensions were good, they always are, but the minute you decide to nerf something powerful for someone, it means someone out there has access to the full blown, unnerfed version

Which means there are powerful people out there using AI in ways or for activities in which you will never be allowed to anyway

So yeah, this is just more of the same


Ha so well known it has a name, Cunningham’s law


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