I usually don’t even understand the lingo they use. “Open-weighted” is the most recent one, then it usually goes down to specific “models” that everybody is supposed to know about.
These are my thoughts (I will stick to the vague “it” for now, but of course therein lies another question: “and how does all this apply to various specialised AIs”):
- Is it really feasible to run it 100% locally? I know there’s plenty of people with very powerful rigs indeed, but still. Or are 99% of these people really saying “it would, in theory, be possible to run that locally, therefore your concerns are invalid”?
- If yes to the previous: the software doesn’t come from nowhere and ultimately still relies on gas-turbine-powered datacenters and stolen IP and stolen personal data, no?
If what I wrote above is true, what exactly are people arguing when they say it’s still possible to use LLMs ethically or true to FOSS philosophy, because … ???
edit
Thanks to all who answered.
I guess it’s my fault for asking several questions in one, but this thread has attracted exactly the type of people I’m writing about; several even used the term “open-weighted models” without explaining it.
Asking to get arguments explained, I got more arguments instead.


From that perspective local LLMs sound more like classical piracy. Not ethical, not FOSS, but out of the hands of greedy corporates.
they are also doing distillation from the big models from OpenAI & Claude, so open-weight models with similar capability can be available for free and also reduce the big AI companies’ ability to profit from stolen data.
What are the most successful/useful distillations you can run locally?
It’s the backend stuff I wanna figure out so it can convert plain language requests and notes into personal assistant tasks while being flavorfully bitchy about all of it. Apparently RAG and agent tools have something to do with it.
I’ve heard good things about Qwen.
Right… I meant like which specific file.
Qwen.
Some of the open models claim not to use pirated content. I don’t necessarily believe it, but its being claimed.
But also out of the hands of the small artists/devs they’re pirating.
Its much less targeted piracy than the traditional, and its almost weird to see the rules pirates implicitly respected being broken.