safe?
local models in a sandbox without phone home sounds pretty safe, but are we there yet?
to my limited understanding the tokens are open source… not the model itself
Chinese models are really good. How you use them depends on what your goals are. If you want something on par with Claude or ChatGPT, you need to go to Deepseek or Qwen’s website. You can also find these models on openrouter. If you want a local/small model, then get ollama and find a model in the repository.
You could also get anythingllm or LM Studio and get models from within the app. There’s also huggingface.
Since you asked about safety, deepseek on the official website does collect info and there was a time some of that info was leaked but you can get around that using something like openrouter. Note similar things happened to ChatGPT and Meta AI. There is also the potential for bias (there was a time people were spamming their Deepseek Tiananmen Square responses – personally, it just would not process my query) but Grok has that same issue.
Look into zen.ai which is opencode’s sister company that provides llm access. “At cost”
You can see just how cheap they are. I use Augment Code at work and they have kimi 2.6. It’s really solid. Opus/GPT are still better, but for many tasks, kimi works great and doesn’t make me cringe at the price.
Qwen 3.6 is supposed to be really good too. I haven’t used it that much.
ollama or llama.cpp to self host if you have a good mac or good video card. this is perfectly safe.
there are a bazillion hosted inference providers to choose from https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/en/index be aware that you are sending your code to fuck knows who and they are sending back fuck knows what. ymmv, yolo.
hook one of them up to opencode.ai or pi.dev or one of the bazillion other ‘harneses’ or whatever we are calling it this week and try not to rm -r anything important.
for a good time try and get a chinese models to say something about tibet, or taiwan… its like having your own virtual tankie tamagochi!
inference providers could be anyone from anywhere, there are even proxy resellers. some are harvesting and reselling your data.
if you send your code to claude/openai/google there is certainly a much higher degree of confidence in who you are sending your data to. yes they to harvest your data and can send you malicious commands (esp if you have a promp injection attack).
its like buying a cheap vps, if the stakes are low its fine, if it important then you need to consider about the consequences of your actions.
The most famous is Deepseek. It’s not even made by “AI” company, it was a side hustle from stock trading company. They released it for free just to flex.
I hear people use minimax as replacement for sonnet and deepseek as replacement for opus, both can be used directly in Claude code instead of Anthropic models
People keep talking about Chinese models, where are they? How do I used them instead of Claude? Are they safe?
safe?
local models in a sandbox without phone home sounds pretty safe, but are we there yet?
to my limited understanding the tokens are open source… not the model itself
Chinese models are really good. How you use them depends on what your goals are. If you want something on par with Claude or ChatGPT, you need to go to Deepseek or Qwen’s website. You can also find these models on openrouter. If you want a local/small model, then get ollama and find a model in the repository. You could also get anythingllm or LM Studio and get models from within the app. There’s also huggingface.
Since you asked about safety, deepseek on the official website does collect info and there was a time some of that info was leaked but you can get around that using something like openrouter. Note similar things happened to ChatGPT and Meta AI. There is also the potential for bias (there was a time people were spamming their Deepseek Tiananmen Square responses – personally, it just would not process my query) but Grok has that same issue.
Look into zen.ai which is opencode’s sister company that provides llm access. “At cost”
You can see just how cheap they are. I use Augment Code at work and they have kimi 2.6. It’s really solid. Opus/GPT are still better, but for many tasks, kimi works great and doesn’t make me cringe at the price.
Qwen 3.6 is supposed to be really good too. I haven’t used it that much.
ollama or llama.cpp to self host if you have a good mac or good video card. this is perfectly safe.
there are a bazillion hosted inference providers to choose from https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/en/index be aware that you are sending your code to fuck knows who and they are sending back fuck knows what. ymmv, yolo.
hook one of them up to opencode.ai or pi.dev or one of the bazillion other ‘harneses’ or whatever we are calling it this week and try not to rm -r anything important.
for a good time try and get a chinese models to say something about tibet, or taiwan… its like having your own virtual tankie tamagochi!
So literally the same as Western-made AI?
inference providers could be anyone from anywhere, there are even proxy resellers. some are harvesting and reselling your data.
if you send your code to claude/openai/google there is certainly a much higher degree of confidence in who you are sending your data to. yes they to harvest your data and can send you malicious commands (esp if you have a promp injection attack).
its like buying a cheap vps, if the stakes are low its fine, if it important then you need to consider about the consequences of your actions.
nb: i am no expert, just fucking around.
Yeah only the Chinese government is currently far better at working behind the scenes with companies than any other government in the world?
Incompetence is a feature of governments at times.
I trust the Chinese government more than American tech corporations. One side is socialist, the other side is fascist.
The most famous is Deepseek. It’s not even made by “AI” company, it was a side hustle from stock trading company. They released it for free just to flex.
I hear people use minimax as replacement for sonnet and deepseek as replacement for opus, both can be used directly in Claude code instead of Anthropic models
Liu Wen tends to be in China
Check Ollama dot com