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by dbeley 46 days ago
The cool thing about open-weights model is that you are free to use alternative providers that won't phone home to the original model creators.

I see 6 alternative providers listed on Openrouter for DeepSeek V4 Pro for example.

1 comments

At least that’s what they’re telling you. It’s a ”trust me bro” scenario.

I’d rather use the phone home version (deepseeks own endpoint). The benefit is that I’m fairly certain that they actually host the model I’m paying for.

If you're not Chinese, and you start a company outside of China, and your whole pitch is "We run open weights and we have nothing to do with China", 1) why would send data to China?? 2) why would you risk your business to do a thing that makes no sense?
A fly by night operation created primarily for the purpose of collecting training data and corporate espionage will make whatever claims they think will get them the right traffic.
Well, the context was running the models via open router, not hosting 800B> models yourself. Of course, if given the option I believe most people would pick ”don’t share sensitive data”.

What I’m trying to say is that EVERYONE uses your data, even the sensitive type. So you might aswell use an endpoint that does what it says and treat EVERY endpoint whether that’s OpenAI or anthropic as if it’s collecting all of your data.

No, not everyone uses your data. There are providers who very explicitly do not collect or use your data.
Sure, and I won’t collect or otherwise store your credit card info if you send it to me. Trust me bro :)

No but seriously, I am astonished by the level of trust you have for these for-profit companies. I’ll remind you of this quote:

”Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. Zuckerberg: I don't know why. Zuckerberg: They "trust me" Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks”

Some providers are based in the US or EU and would face legal repercussions for lying about what they do with your data. It's a bit more than "trust me bro". Off the top of my head, you can use Fireworks, for example, which is based in California and would face the same consequences for lying about their data policy as OpenAI or Anthropic would.
Meta is based in the US, yet they torrented TERABYTES worth of books to feed their AI.

I’m not trying to be negative here, but your point is invalidated by that particular event in itself.

What, because they broke the law in one way, they'd break the law in every way? That's not how business works. The way business works is, I steal from other people to make a product, but then I don't steal from my customers, because if they find out, then I no longer have any customers. (Plus all their customers would sue them, which would both legally and financially tank them)
That's a naive way of thinking. You're saying "oh, they are thieves in this way, but they surely wouldn't be thieves in this other way!"

If you have no problems shitting on tens of thousands of authors of books, you don't have problems shitting on your customers as well (which they have proved again and again, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...)

Let's just say I wholeheartedly disagree with your viewpoint and leave it there :)