"Because you can and its cool" would be reason enough: plenty of revolutions have their origin in "because you can" (Wozniak right off the top of my head, Gates and Altair, stuff like that).
But uncensored is a big deal too: censorship is capability reducing (check out Kilcher's GPT4Chan video and references, the Orca work and Dolphin de-tune lift on SWE-Bench style evals). We pay dearly in capability to get "non-operator-alignment", and you'll notice that competition is hot enough now that at the frontier (Opus, Qwen) the " alignment" away from operators aligned is getting very, very mild.
And then there's the compression. Phi-3 or something works on a beefy laptop and has a nontrivial approximation of "the internet" that works on an airplane or a beach with no network connectivity, talk about vibe coding? I like those look up all the docs via a thumbdrive in Phuket vibes.
And on diffusion stuff, SOTA fits on a laptop or close, you can crush OG mid journey or SD on a macbook, its an even smaller gap.
Early GPT-4 ish outcomes are possible on a Macbook Pro or Razer Blade, so either 12-18 month old LLMs are useless, or GGUF is useful.
The AI goalposts things cuts both ways. If AI is "whatever only Anthropic can do"? That's just as silly as "whatever a computer can't do" and a lot more cynical.
But uncensored is a big deal too: censorship is capability reducing (check out Kilcher's GPT4Chan video and references, the Orca work and Dolphin de-tune lift on SWE-Bench style evals). We pay dearly in capability to get "non-operator-alignment", and you'll notice that competition is hot enough now that at the frontier (Opus, Qwen) the " alignment" away from operators aligned is getting very, very mild.
And then there's the compression. Phi-3 or something works on a beefy laptop and has a nontrivial approximation of "the internet" that works on an airplane or a beach with no network connectivity, talk about vibe coding? I like those look up all the docs via a thumbdrive in Phuket vibes.
And on diffusion stuff, SOTA fits on a laptop or close, you can crush OG mid journey or SD on a macbook, its an even smaller gap.
Early GPT-4 ish outcomes are possible on a Macbook Pro or Razer Blade, so either 12-18 month old LLMs are useless, or GGUF is useful.
The AI goalposts things cuts both ways. If AI is "whatever only Anthropic can do"? That's just as silly as "whatever a computer can't do" and a lot more cynical.