Of course, I’m not in favor of this “AI slop” that we’re having in this century (although I admit that it has some good legitimate uses but greed always speaks louder) but I wonder if it will suffer some kind of piracy, if it is already suffering or people simple are not interested in “pirated AI”
There’s plenty of open-source models, but they very much aren’t better, I’m afraid to say. Even if you have a powerful workstation GPU and can afford to run the serious 70B opensource models at low quantization, you’ll still get results significantly worse than the cutting-edge cloud models. Both because the most advanced models are proprietary, and because they are big and would require hundreds of gigabytes of VRAM to run, which you can trivially rent from a cloud service but can’t easily get in your own PC.
The same goes for image generation - compare results from proprietary services like midjourney to the ones you can get with local models like SD3.5. I’ve seen some clever hacks in image generation workflows - for example, using image segmentation to detect a generated image’s face and hands and then a secondary model to do a second pass over these regions to make sure they are fine. But AFAIK, these are hacks that modern proprietary models don’t need, because they have gotten over those problems and just do faces and hands correctly the first time.
This isn’t to say that running transformers locally is always a bad idea; you can get great results this way - but people saying it’s better than the nonfree ones is mostly cope.