It's foolish not to care about privacy especially as a company. You know how it prevents you from emailing yourself your tax documents? Meanwhile thousands of employees are sending literal design docs, software, product goals, etc to several ai third partys. Not only is that insane, the companies they are sending it too intend too and openly admit to scanning the data, make software products themselves, and intend to create models that can produce their products automatically.

The reason local models hasn't caught on is several fold. It's marketing to say your company follows the latest trend, and there's an inherent pressure to keep AI companies afloat so the economy doesn't entirely collapse. The other is, it wasn't until the last month that these models have caught up to frontier models. They just did, and they are more efficient and don't require a team of 500 to deploy.

Local first models aren't just more private than the API vendors, they also have the advantages of fixed cost, lower latency, and better stability - local models don't get nerfed/"updated" in the background like chatgpt does.

Maybe in a world where these AI companies behaved with some semblance of ethics and user-friendliness they would be on even ground, but for anyone paying attention local models are obviously the future.

> the only real advantage for local models (privacy/secrecy) hasn't proven convincing for broader IT either

Because of nonexistent regulation. Just wait for it…

The legal situation in for example the EU is crystal clear, only that it will take some time to go though all court instances.

To not depend on an external company that can decide the price.