People are trying to “make the best software”, though.

I think the Quixotic accelerationists of AI are more or less a vocal minority of the people who make software, and the choice of online APIs over local systems is largely a choice made for users, rather than developer’s laziness.

You can do more and better with private AI today than with local models. There is no getting around that. Even if local AIs get better, being on the cutting edge of LLM performance is often a very worthy investment.

Most people won’t settle for a product if it’s not the very best and incredibly convenient. That’s a high bar, and local AI often doesn’t meet those standards.

HN’s insistence on treating all users like they are open-source, privacy-first, self-hosted Linux fanatics is painfully corny.

> Most people won’t settle for a product if it’s not the very best and incredibly convenient.

... uh?