Honest question for people who actually use these models:
The main reason I and many others trusted Chinese AI models was open source — you could run them locally, inspect the weights, avoid sending data to Chinese servers. That felt like a reasonable workaround for anyone with privacy or geopolitical concerns.
Now that they're closing up, the calculus changes:
- No local deployment
- API calls go to servers in China
- No way to verify what the model is actually doing
Is this a dealbreaker for you? Or has the model quality gotten good enough that you'd use it anyway?
Also curious: do you think this is a strategic mistake on their part, or a smart move toward commercialization?
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