Dmitry Shutov

When asked what makes a local model better than a top-quality commercial model from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, the usual answer is: privacy. But that's not really the whole story. Privacy matters, of course, but it's not the only thing. Local models have other, more important advantages, and that's what I want to discuss in this article.

It happened that after my last week’s article about Local AI Assistant I discussed AI opportunities with a friend. Christmas time is a good time for friends and family, and he brought up a question about using ChatGPT and the security of his data.

We all know about ChatGPT. OpenAI also provides some APIs that allow you to integrate chat functionality into your applications, for example as a chat-bot. But my friend saw two problems:

• Training Costs: To be useful chat-bot should operate with business data (for example operation hours, prices, etc.), which means he need to train it. Everyone knows that training large language models (LLM or AI) costs a lot of money.
• Data Security: He was willing to use his proprietary data for his own chat-bot but wasn’t comfortable with OpenAI, or any other company incorporating that know-how into their large language models. AI providers typically need more data to train their models, and he doesn’t want his data ending up in someone else’s product.

At that moment, I realized that despite AI’s popularity, people, who don’t work with AI technologies often not have enough information about how they can use it. That’s why, after answering his questions, I decided to publish my answers here.

So the first year of our life in Calgary passed. What can I say? - It was a good year and we like our life in Calgary. We like the calm, green area that we were lucky to be in, like friendly people, like nature and climate. In general, everything is fine!

During this year, we ...