Can anyone recommend me a viable alternative to these clowns? I would like to move my work (excel and light coding) off the big guys. My computer isn’t very powerful though so I need to upgrade or find hosted models (host my own?) that won’t steal my sensitive data?
OpenRouter or Fireworks are two of many that allow you to run numerous different models. You can use open code harnesses like Pi or Opencode that connect easily to these services.
A lot of companies are starting to run towards open models on walled off infra. There might be a moat to be had in really good infra-as-a-service for hosting models, but there’s zero moat to be had in the models themselves. Which is a problem for those trying to convince people a proprietary model company should be worth trillions.
It's better to buy models directly from providers that guarantee the quality of their quantization. Otherwise, model quality is a gamble. You can pay the same $10 on Novita or with any other provider.
Openrouter is not ideal, because you don't know who they send your traffic to and there are rumours of vendors cheating by providing quantized models.
I'm very happy with Deepinfra. Less model coverage, but good prices and quite fast.
However I have to caution you about one thing.
No one will give you as many input tokens for so little money as Claude Max x5 (maybe x20 too, I use x5).
I tend to use 1.1B to 1.4B a week about 0.8-1B cached. Even with cache were talking thousands of $ in API prices a week. Hundreds if we're talking cheap cloud like Deepinfra.
However, local AI well setup is actually a good alternative for this if Claude Max was unavailable.
For example my system a ryzen 7950x 192GB ram, 5x rtx3090 plus an rtx5060 ti 16gb. (3 rtx3090 cards via usb4 egpu dock). Let's me run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next with 3slots (no rtx5060 used) at 55tok/s decode dropping to 50 at the end of a 260k context, 1200tok/s refill dropping to 950 at the end of context.
With RAM and ssd cashing and 80% cache were talking on the order of 4B a week could be ingested by this setup (roughly) if it was running 24/7. I found 6 interactive cloud code sessions are fairly pleasant with this 3 user setup.
If I include the rtx5060 in the mix I can bump to 5 users, but it slows down by about 15% (note the speeds are give are for one active user, multiple users at once see maybe 70% of tgat per user so aggregate is much higher in multi user setup).
So in theory I should be able to run 10 cloud code sessions. Although I'm testing CC alternative now (pi with own plugins) because this model, while multimodal has only 260k context 30k of which CC eats on the getgo.
Many people say local AI makes no sense financially. But in the event you process huge inputs that are often cached it does make sense.
> Openrouter is not ideal, because you don't know who they send your traffic to and there are rumours of vendors cheating by providing quantized models.
OpenRouter allows to make an API key locked to certain provider, I do that myself.
> Amodei, meanwhile, outlined some very specific things he wants from Washington: Stop selling Nvidia chips to China so its AI companies can’t build better models, and a crackdown on model distillation.
You have to be the embodiment of hubris to believe the only reason a technologically advanced country of 1.4 billion people with several AI labs and government support can make competitive models is because they all distill yours.
It’s not only hubris — I think it’s actively counterproductive. The US could choose to:
(a) Sell many billions of dollars of fancy chips to China, thus bringing in billions of dollars of money and billions of dollars of trade balance improvement. And let China continue to build models quickly when they seem oddly happy to export the trained weights for free.
Or
(b) Decline to do so, thus reducing exports and very very strongly encouraging China to do everything in their power to avoid needing to depend on our chips.
In exchange for (b), what do we gain? A temporary advantage in model training and availability?
Don't forget that when they increase export restrictions under the current US regime they signal further that economic ties are on their terms not fair terms. The rest of the world will continue to steer towards alternatives to US tech.
It's funny because this is EXACTLY how it played out with Japan in the mid-20th century. "Japan can only make cheap copies of our stuff!" They even joke about it in Back to the Future.
People joke how we live in Idiocracy now, but Back to the Future really nailed it with the dystopian world ruled by Biff the billionaire bully with no class or taste.
I think there is an obvious example in the FAA of a successful safety regulation of another potentially dangerous technology industry. A similar agency would seem to me like a logical starting point. I did some minor work a long time ago in commercial avionics software and while it was a very tedious process I did have confidence in it. Obviously a lot of things would have to be different but the basic structure of development and testing standards, record keeping, transparency, and government incident investigation seems like the place to start.
"Giant Metal Things Hucked Through the Air Across Ocean" are of a quantitatively higher risk profile than "New Computer Thing", no matter how you slice that particular salami.
If you tossed the aviation regulatory framework out the window, you have maybe ten years before aviation reverts to high end hobbyists[1], due to the escalating risk profile.
I can't find the reference right now, but I'm certain that Anthropic has been asking for a coordinated slowdown for at least 4 or 5 months. I think it was around their Mythos/Fable releases this spring.
Four ostensibly competing billionaires agree with each other and want worldwide government regulations around their moneymaking? o_O
Chilling and suspicious. Of course, this will lead to a modicum of safety in some provable way to justify (in uncritical minds) the rest of the implications: fewer freedoms and more surveillance for everyone else.
"AI" alignment for the good of humanity has completely failed. Now one of the most powerful technology of our time is in the hands of sociopaths who want to rule the world and decide the evolutionary course of future generations.
If it was that serious, we would be seeing a lot more agency then a tweet and a blog post. I'm not even sure why the public needs to know about how "scary" AI is as we can't do much, don't know any of the technical details and Anthropic have already decided to punish anyone involved in anti-ai protests.
"Anthropic Is Building a Huge Surveillance System to Spy on Anti-AI Activists and Predict Their Activities"
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[ 0.45 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadhttps://openrouter.ai/
https://fireworks.ai/
http://pi.dev/
https://opencode.ai/
I'm very happy with Deepinfra. Less model coverage, but good prices and quite fast.
However I have to caution you about one thing.
No one will give you as many input tokens for so little money as Claude Max x5 (maybe x20 too, I use x5).
I tend to use 1.1B to 1.4B a week about 0.8-1B cached. Even with cache were talking thousands of $ in API prices a week. Hundreds if we're talking cheap cloud like Deepinfra.
However, local AI well setup is actually a good alternative for this if Claude Max was unavailable.
For example my system a ryzen 7950x 192GB ram, 5x rtx3090 plus an rtx5060 ti 16gb. (3 rtx3090 cards via usb4 egpu dock). Let's me run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next with 3slots (no rtx5060 used) at 55tok/s decode dropping to 50 at the end of a 260k context, 1200tok/s refill dropping to 950 at the end of context.
With RAM and ssd cashing and 80% cache were talking on the order of 4B a week could be ingested by this setup (roughly) if it was running 24/7. I found 6 interactive cloud code sessions are fairly pleasant with this 3 user setup.
If I include the rtx5060 in the mix I can bump to 5 users, but it slows down by about 15% (note the speeds are give are for one active user, multiple users at once see maybe 70% of tgat per user so aggregate is much higher in multi user setup).
So in theory I should be able to run 10 cloud code sessions. Although I'm testing CC alternative now (pi with own plugins) because this model, while multimodal has only 260k context 30k of which CC eats on the getgo.
Many people say local AI makes no sense financially. But in the event you process huge inputs that are often cached it does make sense.
OpenRouter allows to make an API key locked to certain provider, I do that myself.
This is crazy but honestly very tempting at this point.
You have to be the embodiment of hubris to believe the only reason a technologically advanced country of 1.4 billion people with several AI labs and government support can make competitive models is because they all distill yours.
(a) Sell many billions of dollars of fancy chips to China, thus bringing in billions of dollars of money and billions of dollars of trade balance improvement. And let China continue to build models quickly when they seem oddly happy to export the trained weights for free.
Or
(b) Decline to do so, thus reducing exports and very very strongly encouraging China to do everything in their power to avoid needing to depend on our chips.
In exchange for (b), what do we gain? A temporary advantage in model training and availability?
If you tossed the aviation regulatory framework out the window, you have maybe ten years before aviation reverts to high end hobbyists[1], due to the escalating risk profile.
[1] or proletarian desperation, of course.
It’s so obvious they’re playing safety card to get politicians to reign down on individual’s freedoms.
All at once in lockstep?
Who paid them to say this? These are all lies.
Chilling and suspicious. Of course, this will lead to a modicum of safety in some provable way to justify (in uncritical minds) the rest of the implications: fewer freedoms and more surveillance for everyone else.
"Anthropic Is Building a Huge Surveillance System to Spy on Anti-AI Activists and Predict Their Activities"
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-surve...