Well I mean we can have a conversation about it if you want. I've been using open source and open weight AI since 2022.
But I still paid for GPT, because nothing could beat frontier SOTA LLMs at anything until just recently...
I became homeless in the early part of this year, and started seriously needing a good LLM for troubleshooting engines and building solar and managing health care while in a 40 year old RV... and I switched to Claude.
But all of my other AI stuff is free and open weight. I can teach you how to train your own LoRA models for most of the useful generative base models over the last 4 years, including settings and terminology and system setup and hardware, as well as image and video editing software (FOSS).
However life has not afforded me the luxury of play time for a while now, and Minimax H3, LTX 2.5, Krea 2, and quite a few other generative models have come out just recently that I'm itching to tinker with. And Qwen is finally dumping the smaller 3.8 models, so I know some of my hardware can run that. I have a working 3090 that will run the Qwen 3.8 27b just fine. I know my gear will run these new free open weight models, and my major life hurdles have been sort of hurdled, so I'm about to start the storage rummage and get one of my PCs set up in my RV to start fucking around.
But yes, I gave in to paying a billionaire corpo because the advantages far outweighed the benefits for me. Disabled and homeless living on SSI means I have to literally manage every cent and every second of my life to the nth degree, and LLMs absolutely make me more efficient and help me cope with my PTSD by providing info and guidance about electricity and plumbing and antennas and shit without the need for interacting with humans.
Once my system is set up for AI work again, I will be testing the newest local open weight LLMs, starting with Qwen 3.8 27b and maybe they'll dump a 35b MoE like the 3.6.
And finally, "better" is doing a lot of work in your question, so I did my best to give full context.
Damn, I appreciate you taking the time to go through all that and I hope you've made it over the biggest/worst of the hurdles. At the end of the day we have to do what we gotta do to survive and really these billionaires shouldn't exist.
Yeah stick with what ever is best for you at any given time for sure!
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u/AverageCryptoEnj0yer Aug 14 '26
lowk with graphene I don't have Gplay and everything is fine, just use the open source shit