alt Hacker News> If you can run a model locally then you can somewhat train out the guardrails, censorship, and brand-safety.
When does the average person actually need to do that?
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I just got some kind of cyber alert from Claude and was forced back down to Opus while I was trying to connect to a battery I own via bluetooth.
So I can certainly understand why someone would want the guardrails gone.
"Need" might be a bit too strong, but I do want overly obnoxious guardrails not to stand in the way.
Case in point, last week I was poking Opus 5 into writing me some RPi-pico firmware for driving a small e-paper screen. Font was built in right into C code as hex constants. Space being tight, I asked if there is some clever compression that could be applied. Claude thought for good 10 minutes, then guardrail kicked in telling me that was "cyber", and refused to continue.
We've already seen frontier models refuse to answer almost any question that touches on computer security and be very likely to kick out biology and chemistry questions even if they aren't all that close to breeding dangerous viruses or making explosives.
I expect this is only going to get worse. "Censorship" isn't just going to be about who you vote for and which political party the model will say nice things about and which it is more likely to say bad things about. It's going to become about whether the hoi polloi are allowed to have effective AIs at all. Like the 1990s internet, AI has outrun a lot of power structures but that is not going to continue indefinitely.