[rapind]

> The best "free" experience I've found is using OpenCode with Big Pickle.

I have absolutely zero interest in free. I honestly don't think I'm even remotely in the same demographic as people using free tiers / models.

I want to pay. I don't want my data used for training. I want it to be open. I want it to be consistently up (more than Claude!). I want it to be fast. I don't want it to be subsidized as that's just an excuse for shitty quality. Deepseek flash knocks it out of the park on all of these except you're data is used in training. I'm fine with it being hosted since there's no way I'm using it 24/7, but data MUST be private.

Basically I want Hetzner and OVH to run open model clouds. I'm convinced this is going to happen eventually when everyone realizes this is a commodity.

[milesvp]

If you think your data isn’t being hoovered up I’d like to point out that every model is possible due to federal crimes committed to obtain the information they were trained on. Regardless of how much you are paying, your data is worth another petty civil infraction.

[horacemorace]

A million times this. There is “private” as a corporate-legality licensing perspective. There is “private” as a human concept. The two are seemingly opposite, yet as all the money is focused on the former there’s no airtime left for the latter.

[suncemoje]

Then I'm interested if there are any facts as to what ZDR actually means?

[jaapz]

It can still mean Zero Data Retention - i just comes down to whether you trust the company to actually do what they promise.

The fact that they've trained models on data that wasn't theirs does not make me trust them a lot when they make this claim.

[munksbeer]

When discussing this, may I ask (I know you are probably bored of the actual arguments), what does "trained models on data that wasn't theirs" actually mean in practice?

Again, I know these arguments have been done to death, but every human who reads source code that wasn't written by them, or views art that wasn't created by them, and practices against this art, is training their brain on data "that wasn't theirs".

They are frequently making a living doing so.

Is this distinction the scale, or is there actually a different more strict definition that we should be using as a common language to talk about this? As in, I should not even be reading certain source code if it is not licensed appropriate, or I will be in breach because I'm training myself illegally? And the same question for art, etc?

[VBprogrammer]

In general humans don't have perfect recall. Even people with what we might call a photographic memory don't have the ability to memorise millions of lines of code and output them with little effort.

It hinges somewhat on the concept of how much you believe things are being learned and how much is just pattern matching and borrowing a solution from memory. Certainly in the early days of Copilot it was possible to get it to output chunks of open source code near verbatim.

I think, generally, people are probably closer to believing that there is some kind of reasoning being carried out by these models than in those early days but it would also be easy to strip all of the immediately identifiable comments etc from the training materials to make it harder to detect.

[dpoloncsak]

A product is not a human. They are selling a product based off copy-righted material without the rights to it. It's a pretty easy line to draw, honestly.

[glitchc]

Once they feed your data into the training dataset, they can delete the individualized copy. The training dataset is, of course, a trade secret that can never be exposed without causing serious harm to the company's model, or equivalent legalese that will prevent it's disclosure to all, governments included.

[wahern]

Copyright violation is not per se a crime. I think a colorable defense of fair use, even if it would fail in a civil trial, would negate the mens rea element. I can't easily find caselaw or articles regarding this, though, as most criminal copyright cases involve straightforward reproduction and distribution schemes. Maybe that's because prosecutors won't press cases that might raise a question of fair use?

But I agree with your larger point. AI companies have copied Uber's aggressive posture, pushing the legal envelope with expectations of positive return. Surely they'll continue doing the same in other areas.

[larodi]

The curiosity is that these companies somehow got around crimes and are above law (1) and these crimes mean something in a limited jurisdiction, like copyright laws of USA/Canada are not world’s (2). So it’s all cyberpunk at this point.

[aamoscodes]

You can pay, and also use deepseek-v4-flash. OpenRouter even lets you "block" or limit your usage to providers that don't train on data. Since the weights are open, other companies are already serving the model on non-DeepSeek owned hardware: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash

[fc417fc802]

> OpenRouter even lets you "block" or limit your usage to providers that don't train on data.

More than that, they have various zero data retention options and provide a convenient json list of them.

[larodi]

The fact OpenRouter strips https to reroute screams danger already.

[fc417fc802]

What do you mean? Are you objecting that they communicate with the provider on your behalf? But how else would you design such a system?

Plumbing you straight through would require nonstandard certificate juggling and they wouldn't be able to implement their core service of providing a standardized API nor could they transparently route your request to the fastest / cheapest / whatever provider on the fly nor could they implement transparent fallback nor could they implement their policy of not billing you if the response from the provider is invalid.

Also the chosen provider could fingerprint your network stack if you communicated directly. The routing service is acting as a proxy and for most providers fully anonymizes requests (it does send a stable uid to some of them though).

[larodi]

Precisely this. That somehow is okay to put your trust into man in the middle. To your comment how you do it - yes it is difficult to do it right, but not impossible.

[rapind]

Good to know. I hadn't checks since early is DS4's launch when they were the only provide (I think maybe there was one other, but they also trained on your data). I see several private options now.

[darkmarmot]

Hard to guarantee it's private if you don't keep it local... I don't have a lot of trust for companies in this space.

[rapind]

Yes, but I think that'll change eventually. If you trust hosting your code with a specific cloud provider then you'll probably also trust them for code assist. At least that's my theory.

There'll probably need to be a threat of massive litigation should they fail to comply with such a policy.

[naikrovek]

> Yes, but I think that'll change eventually.

Maybe people will trust companies, but those companies will rarely deserve that trust. Anyone that pays attention sees breach announcements almost every day. Security is never a concern for these companies until it embarrasses them. Then, as soon as the negative attention fades, security again becomes the second to last priority.

Do not trust companies with any data that is important to you unless the effective management of that data is required by law, and the laws are comprehensive.

[fc417fc802]

If your contract says there's no data retention and then a bunch of your retained data gets leaked in a breach presumably you have grounds for a lawsuit.

[ted_dunning]

That may be true, but it is likely that the contract limits you to arbitration, forbids class action and limits the penalty dramatically.

[rob74]

My company has all the code in a private GitLab instance (almost everything else is on AWS, but not GitLab), but they still use Cursor, so our internal code gets sent to whatever AI company the model I select in the dropdown belongs to. Scary if you think about it: if you use Cursor, you don't have to trust only one specific AI company, you have to trust all of them...

[pessimizer]

> If you trust hosting your code with a specific cloud provider then you'll probably also trust them for code assist.

I'm interested in this thought. There is significant motivation for providers to create a verifiable way for them not to deal with having access to client interactions with LLMs at all. Whatever standards and protocols have to be come up with in order to reassure clients.

Any good standards for privacy when interacting with LLMs could also trickle down to smaller providers, and everyone could offer guarantees. Even if the guarantee was literally just an insurance policy and a private court to decide if it pays out.

[jen20]

I trust AWS in this space. I'm 100% sure that they will be precisely honoring the terms of service for Bedrock (I've never looked to see whether they claim to train on your data though).

[kube-system]

You didn’t look because you subconsciously know you don’t need to. AWS has a solid track record, and the certifications and audits to back it up. and that’s why everyone trusts them including the most extreme of regulated industries.

Bedrock in fact does not train on your data. It was a big deal when it was announced that they share data with Anthropic for Fable, but even then it was gated away where you’d have to explicitly allow it.

[rlkf]

> Basically I want Hetzner and OVH to run open model clouds

You can run Qwen3 on OVH already:

<https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/ai-endpoints/catalo...>

[johndough]

I see that OVH offers Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, which is a bit surprising to me. I thought that EU providers had to comply with the AI act where you have to provide opt-out and information about the training data once the model is sufficiently large (over 10^23 FLOPs, likely the case here), but providing information is not possible since people who train those models only give vague information at best.

Does anyone know if OVH is ignoring the law here, or whether it does not apply for some reason?

[nl]

OVH is acting as a "Deployer", not a "Provider", which have special meaning under the AI Act.

There are much less (almost no) disclosure regulations on the deployer.

https://ethicalogic.com/articles/gpai-guide-roles-public-dat...

[dofm]

Pretty convenient, it must be noted, for a market that does not have any meaningful home grown models.

[Der_Einzige]

What are you talking about? Le Chaton Fat is the best 30T model no the planet!

[dofm]

Which law is that?

Not doubting you — just want to read it!

[johndough]

Article 53 of the AI Act: https://ai-act-law.eu/article/53/

The definition of a "genral-purpose AI model" is described in more detail in the "Guidelines on the scope of obligations for providers of general-purpose AI models under the AI Act": https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/11834...

[dofm]

Thanks, v. interesting.

[zwaps]

Does not apply to oss models

[dofm]

Does it not apply to hosting and running them for money? How would it not?

[saghm]

I'm probably somewhat adjacent to you. I would be happy to pay, but I just don't want to pay any of the companies that are actually offering things right now. I had the $20/month sub for Claude for a couple months, until one day I kept inexplicably getting errors saying I hit the limit even though their site showed my usage at less than half for the session and 8% for the week, and it seemed silly to pay for something that couldn't even properly respect its own measurements. OpenAI sketches me out too much as a company, Cursor feels lackluster when I use it for work from the account they pay for (and now is getting acquired by maybe the only AI company even sketchier than OpenAI), and I wasn't particularly impressed with Gemini or Mistral Vibe either when I tried them on the free tiers either.

[rapind]

I was paying around $500 / month on average between multiple providers for over a year. I cancelled one a while ago because of pretty bad service availability (Bet you guess who that is!), which by all reports hasn't improved much.

For me, paying from $200 - $500 / month is reasonable if I can sustain a disruption free flow that doesn't require constant yak shaving. What I've found experimenting with DeepSeek on some open source library stuff is that it's actually going to cost me much less if I don't need frontier vibing (which I don't).

[gaolei8888]

who?

[gb2d_hn]

For me it's about the value of my time. I think that it's important that we have open models, but for getting real work done, my time is too valuable to waste it on subpar results or additional agent management when a max plan covers all the use I need. It's not worth quibbling over. If the cost / benefit ratio changes, I'll be looking harder at local set ups, but not at the moment.

[Bnjoroge]

You can specify which providers you want to serve your model in OpenRouter. Then you can chose US-based ones.

[dvngnt_]

Would venace ai work?

[djmips]

Did you try Claude Fable?

[bel8]

These competent open models you want to use were trained on data from people like you and me.

I wonder if there are competent models trained purely on permissive open-source code like MIT or Apache 2.0.

[yencabulator]

MIT and Apache 2.0 both require attribution, so it's not like limiting to those would help in license compliance.

[superze]

Hetzner workforce can barely run a mature technology called s3 and you think they will be able to deploy openmodels?

[KronisLV]

What mature implementations of S3 are there? MinIO that rugpulled the community, Garage that doesn’t even have proper setup scripts in their Docker containers and expect you to do the init manually, or Zenko cloud server that more or less got abandoned? I think there’s also SeaweedFS which might do better but I’m surprised at how shitty everything seems in this space - surely people aren’t being crazy and either storing their files on the FS directly to expose access to them through their app (hello directory traversal attacks) or storing them in relational DBs (hello wasted bandwidth and bloated backups).

The odd jank extends further, like Sonatype Nexus and some other software hardcodes AWS regions to choose from when configuring the storage even though your self-hosted implementation doesn’t have anything to do with AWS so you just have to come up with fake regions. If the cloud vendors each have to reimplement it because there is nothing as quality as PostgreSQL is for DBs, but for S3, then I’m hardly surprised at the state of things.

[chrislusf]

I work on SeaweedFS. Let me know if see any bugs or just create a github issue.