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.
if you’re selfhosting AI, make sure you at least firewall it off from the internet. many providers still send metrics back home that includes usage and content.
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.