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Comment by captaincrowbar | Hacker News Reader

The big problem with AI R&D is that nobody can keep up with the big bux companies. It makes this kind of project a bit pointless. Even if you can run a GPT3-equivalent on a web browser, how many people are going to bother (except as a stunt) when GPT4 is available?

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The ones that can't use the GPT4 for whatever reason. Maybe you are a company and you don't want to send OpenAI your prompts. Or a person who has very private prompts and feel sketchy about sending them over.

Or maybe you are an individual who has a use case that's too edgy for OpenAI or a silicon valley corporate image. When Replika shut down people trying to have virtual boyfriend/girlfriends on their platform, their reddit filled up with people who mourned like they just lost a partner.

I think it's important that alternative non-big bux company options exist, even if most people don't want to or need to use them.

Those are seriously niche use cases. They exist but can they fund gpt5 level development?

Most corporations/governments would prefer to keep their AI conversations private. Definitely mainstream desire, not niche.

Who does your government and corporate email? In the UK it's all either Gmail (for government) and Outlook (NHS). For compliance reasons they simply want data center certification and location restrictions.

If you think a small corp is going to get a big gov contract outside of a nepo-state you're in for a shock.

Given the Replika debacle, I personally suspect the AI partner use case is not really very niche. Just few people openly want to talk about wanting it because having an emotional AI partner is seen as creepy.

And companies would not want to do that. Imagine you make partner AI that goes unhinged like Bing did and tells you to kill yourself or something similar. I can't imagine companies would want that kind of risk.

If you AI partner data can't be stored in an Azure or similar data centre you are a serious small niche person!

Even Jennifer Lawrence stored her nudes on iCloud.

Or maybe you're in Italy and OpenAI had just been banned from the country for not adhering to GDPR. I suspect the rest of the EU may follow soon.

An increasingly common complaint I'm hearing about GPT3/4/etc is people who don't want to pass any of their private data to another company.

Running models locally is by far the most promising solution for that concern.

Cost is a big reason. It doesn't matter how good the top-of-the-line models are if the cheaper ones suit your needs. Commoditization is great that way. I'd absolutely use an open source GPT-4 in my browser over a pricy closed GPT-5 once we get to that point.

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