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by Liwink 442 days ago
What's the major use case of open source models? The stable diffusion community seems pretty active. A lot of fine tuning to generate NSFW. What about LLM?
3 comments

The biggest use case of open-source LLM is that your use of it is private and input is not sent to third-parties. For a personal perspective, it means it's free and accessible forever (and yes can be used for NSFW stuff), and from a business perspective, it matters both for legal reasons such as finetuning on propritary data and it mitigates the business liability of issues with the third-party LLM provider such as random API outages.
It's a huge compliance hurdle at my company to add any new vendor, so we almost exclusively use open models that we can run on our own hardware (or our rented cloud instances). Even just getting Bedrock enabled in one of our existing AWS accounts has been in the works for months.
When coupled with smaller parameters sizes, it enables BYOD, different cost scaling, and local inference.