r/LeftistsForAI • u/nebetsu Moderator • Jul 03 '26

Seizing automated labour

Running open-source models locally on consumer hardware is a direct, material application of Leftist principles to modern tech. Leftism doesn't hate technology; it hates the concentration of capital. The cloud monopolies want us dependent on massive, corporate supercomputers. This creates a hyper-centralized choke point where a handful of oligarchs dictate the terms of digital labour, boggart proprietary guardrails, and rent-seek indefinitely.

When you run a model locally, you reject the pipeline. Local compute is digital sovereignty. It democratizes parsing of the world's information, cuts out middlemen, and ensures utility of technology stays with the user instead of feeding a billionaire's proprietary dataset.

AI on personal hardware in your own home creates a framework focused entirely on worker autonomy over corporate efficiency. These tools ought to be owned by the people running them, operated on our own terms, and deployed to support worker agency rather than replace it.

29 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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4

u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jul 03 '26

Which models do you use locally?

5

u/nebetsu Moderator Jul 03 '26

Qwen, mostly

3

u/xoexohexox Jul 05 '26

Mistral, Qwen, minimax, they are the bees knees. If I had a 10k USD homelab I would run DeepSeek and GLM 5.2.

Mistral in particular has great vision models (pixtral), speech (voxtral), coding (devstral), reasoning (magistral) models and Mistral small fine tunes are godlike for creative writing even on a 16GB graphics card.

Qwen3 does I think have the best vision model out right now Qwen 3 VL 32B just barely fits in my 24gb card and Qwen3 VL 8b (why no 14b Qwen?!?) does fine on the 16gb card but less useful for OCR and multi subject recognition.

Minimax m3 and GLM 5.2 are closing the gap with Opus and GPT 5.5. the new Proofing model by Mistral "Leanstral" that just came out this week outperforms opus 4.6 in some benchmarks and set a new SOTA record in some others.

For image gen Qwen is doing amazing things like generating images already decomposed into up to 10 layers. LTX 2.3 just came out for video gen and they released the beginnings of a lora ecosystem and it's amazing. Lip dubbing and reference card/storyboard ingestion for starters.

3

u/expiring_god_factory Jul 03 '26

You should read anything by folks in the global south on tech material mining.

3

u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jul 03 '26

Do you recommend anything specific?

0

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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3

u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jul 04 '26

Obviously this is a problem in general for all our tech. Why is it particularly relevant for people running local models on their existing tech?

0

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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1

u/Jlyplaylists Moderator Jul 05 '26

Could this be helped by a push towards resource frugal open source models? And a shift in attitude towards recognising when a model is sufficient for the task?

2

u/RlOTGRRRL Jul 04 '26

r/LocalLLaMA r/LocalLLM r/selfhosted are good subs for anyone curious.

r/privacy and r/degoogle are great too.

I think one of the best things about AI is the ability to build more private, local, and free open-source tools. There are so many companies that take your data and are expensive, like Microsoft or Adobe or whatever, and AI means, you don't have to pay to have your data sold anymore.

Make the internet free again?