This is a good time to promote running your own models. I have been running my own models locally and I would wager a local model will meet 85-95% of your needs if you really learn to use it. These models have gotten great. For anyone wanting to get into this, the smartest models to run recently that is consumer friendly was just released, checkout Qwen3.5 the 27B and 35B variants. They are small and I recommend running full Q8 quants. The easiest way to run these without dealing with complex GPU is to get a mac. For the example I gave, a 64gb mac will handle it well. If you are really cash strapped then you can manage with a 32gb but will have to run with less resolution quants. If you are not cashed strap, then get at least a 128gb and if possible a 256gb. The models are so good you will regret not getting a better system. You can join the r/LocalLlama community in reddit to learn some more. But this is pretty easy. Grab llama.cpp, grab a gguf quant from huggingface.co - the unsloth quants are great - https://huggingface.co/unsloth/models
An even easier way to get into this is simply by downloading a program called LM Studio. You can mount a model and chat to it within 10-15 mins with no experience whatsoever, and no configuration at all.
That said, last time I tried local LLMs (around when gpt-oss came out) it still seemed super gimmicky (or at least niche, I could imagine privacy concerns would be a big deal for some). Very few use cases where you want an LLM but can't benefit immensely from using SOTA models like Claude Opus.
I have a 24GB Macbook Pro. I will note, do get the 'Pro' models, the Mac Mini and the Macbook Air do not have internal fans. The Macbook Pro has an internal fan, and the Mac Studio (bigger Mac Mini) has a fan. If you get a Mini, you might want to get one of those docks that cools the Mini. Your hardware will get very hot very quickly.
Also, because Apple in their infinite wisdom despite giving you a fan, very lazily turn it on (I swear it has to hit 100c before it comes on) and they give you zero control over fan settings, you may want to snag something like TG Pro for the Mac. I wound up buying a license for it, this lets you define at which temperature you want to run your fans and even gives you manual control.
On my 24G RAM Macbook Pro I have about 16GB of Inference. I use Zed with LM Studio as the back-end. I primarily just use Claude Code, but as you note, I'm sure if I used a beefier Mac with more RAM I could probably handle way more.
There's a few models that are interesting on the Mac with LM Studio that let you call tooling, so it can read your local files and write and such:
mistralai/mistralai-3-3b this one's 4.49GB - So I can increase my context window for it, not sure if it auto-compacts or not, have only just started testing it
zai-org/glm-4.6v-flash - This one is 7.09GB, same thing, only just started testing it.
mistralai/mistral-3-14b-reasoning - This one is 15.2GB just shy of the max, so not a TON of wiggle room, but usable.
If you're Apple or a company that builds things for Macs or other devices, please build something to help with airflow / cooling for the MBP / Mac Mini, it feels ridiculous that it becomes a 100c device I'm not so sure its great for device health if you want to use inference for longer than the norm.
I will probably buy a new Mac whenever the inference speeds increase at a dramatic enough rate. I sure hope Apple is considering serious options for increasing inference speed.
Isn't between Q4-Q6 the usual recommendation for quants? Can you explain the Q8 recommendation, as I was under the impression that if you can run a model at Q8, you should probably run a bigger model in Q4 instead
I really hope at some point in the near future AI models shrink enough or laptops get strong enough to run AI models locally. I haven't tried in the past year, but when I did it was very slow token output + laptop was on fire to make that happen.
I've wanted to try some of the more recent 8B models for local tab completion or agentic, any experience with those kinds of smaller models?
The big AI labs are almost certainly selling inference below cost and burning mountains of money. With the insane increase in hardware prices, running models locally just doesn’t make any financial sense.
I just can't help but imagine ChatGPT's sycophancy mixed with military operations. "Sharp insight bombing that wedding! Next would you like tips on mosques to bomb, or I can suggest some new napalm recipes that are extra spicey. Your call!"
Department of Defense: You just bombed the wrong Georgia! The people of Atlanta are furious!
ChatGPT: You're absolutely right, and you're right to call that out. Upon examination it does appear that there might have been a mistake with the coordinates of the bomb. Let's try again, this time we will double check before we launch any missiles! :missile emoji:
The point is it will be autonomous, the prompt could just be 'keep me safe' which will be interpreted who knows how and presumably no further prompting.
Assuming it's not smart enough to write logs that make it less likely to be prosecuted/ disabled by coming up with fake reasons.
It can just say you were a terrorist because you were an adult male traveling with something in your hands. Humans already do this to justify strikes, likely the AI would do the same.
I actually cancelled my ChatGPT subscription in late 2024 and documented the process, kind of as a social media thing because it had gotten so bad and I realized nobody in my family was using it anymore. I asked my wife if she was getting any use out of it and she told me she had been using Gemini and Grok for months because "GPT is very lazy now".
After a while another charge came in for the subscription, but I had the receipts: we had cancelled before the next billing cycle. I decided to try and reach out to OpenAI to resolve this, but they only let you chat with GPT itself for this, which it failed at and told me they weren't in the wrong and none of the information matched what actually happened.
I took this and used it to submit a chargeback request with Privacy.com, which I use for all of my online purchases. Normally I don't have to worry about this because I set a limit or cancel the cards I issue manually, but I had an OpenAI API account using the same card and I had been a bit lazy in using the same card for technically two different services.
Well, Privacy.com won that dispute and I got that money back. It's worth mentioning this is actually different than most banks will do now days. For the most part when you try to get a bank to do a chargeback they just roll it into their insurance and refund you the customer as a cost of doing business, but the actual scammer or shady merchant got to keep their stolen money, whereas I can be certain OpenAI didn't keep my money.
Your last statement is false. A shady merchant never gets to keep the stolen money. The card issuer/bank refunds you immediately because of consumer protection laws. But that charge is immediately charged to the processor. The processor then gets the merchant involved in a dispute process. If the merchant loses the processor charges the merchant. One way they do it is to immediately deduct it from their current processed transactions. If the merchant is no longer processing, they will usually go try to claw it back from their bank account if they have no held reserves, and if they can't get it, they send the merchant to collection. At the end the merchant must eat the cost or the processor. So in your case, the bank didn't eat the cost. OpenAI certainly ate the cost and the chargeback fees.
> Your last statement is false. A shady merchant never gets to keep the stolen money.
Or any merchant for that matter. Chargebacks (from bad actors) are one of the most annoying things when you sell online when you’re a honest legit business. Stripe even charges you a penalty fee on top of that.
Your credibility is shot when you claim that banks will just give you money. They absolutely do not. In fact, Discover has admitted to me in writing, that they always rule in favor of the Merchant if that Merchant responds to the dispute -- regardless of what their response says.
I've dealt with multiple chargebacks over the years and have only ever lost once -- when the Manager at Lowes' showed a check they wrote me [after I opened the dispute].
They absolutely do not just do anything and "write it off".
Please be human and don't just rattle of high-confidence, baseless claims, especially as a giant billboard to Privacy.com
> Discover has admitted to me in writing, that they always rule in favor of the Merchant if that Merchant responds to the dispute -- regardless of what their response says
What, always? Like, literally 100% of the time if the merchant responds at all, they automatically win?
That's very hard to believe. I don't know Discover but I do know Visa and that's not how their system works at all.
I had been considering ditching everyday ChatGPT use in favor of Claude anyway, but hadn’t gotten around to it mostly out of habit. Now I have a good reason to do it.
Same, I had put Claude in my metaphorical shopping cart about two weeks ago but I already had some inertia with ChatGPT + Codex and figured it wouldn't be better enough to justify changing.
That has changed, so I canceled my ChatGPT membership and signed up for Claude. I still have five bucks of credit I bought a year ago for the OpenAI API that I do not believe I can have refunded back, so some of my apps are going to have to stick to OpenAI until those credits run out since I'm not going to just donate five bucks to them.
Playing with it now, I honestly can't tell too much of a difference, which as far as I am concerned is a good thing.
Consider carefully the usage limits of both services before deleting your account (as you cannot create a new one later with the same email). Claude's €20/month sub offers very little and this has unfortunately kept me from switching when I tried earlier this month.
I had been using both, ChatGPT mostly for chats and Claude mostly for code. Now I cancelled the ChatGPT subscription and turned on extra usage in Claude instead.
I get a fair amount of use out of it. I'm not using it for professional software development, just hobby stuff that I don't to write the boring parts of. For 20 bucks a month that seems pretty reasonable.
I love that the tool in question is very calm and collected, in contrast with the emotional wreck that is the US regime. I got a very helpful response to this prompt and I will make it continue working on a python script to get my historical chats looking good in Obsidian.
> Ok. So I'm cancelling the subscription to ChatGPT and moving over to Claude because of the news of OpenAI striking a deal with us department of war. (https://www.techradar.com/pro/openai-just-signed-a-huge-deal...) Please line out a good exit strategy where I can keep the information in my chats and projects on my own hard drive.
What value does this give you? Part of why I deleted my account was I couldn't think of a single thing of value in my chats from the past couple years? Maybe some nostalgia looking at what bugs I was fixing?
For me this is very valuable. The results of personal "research projects" are in there. I use it for reference. Of course I could ask Claude to get me those answers but why waste the energy?
Thanks, but I guess I understand the sentiment. I probably should have not said that I couldn't think of "a single thing of value" when that is a bit of a judgement along with my question. Anyways, it is interesting hearing what people ask it, I think I've only ever used it like a search engine / bug fixing while it seems some people have much deeper conversations or discussions that are worth remembering.
I for one might use these chats as an input for switching over to keep the learning process fast. For me it took a while for ChatGPT to get me. I know that other people delete memories because they want a clean slate experience with every chat. I use chatGPT mostly private (use claud code for work for instance) and I prefer that memories travel across chats.
I've found the free tier to be extremely limited recently, but in a stochastic way. Some days I ask one friggin question and it tells me I only have two questions left and should upgrade. I just switch to a different model.
A few days ago I went to cancel mine and it just said they'd give me a free month instead so I said OK. I thought it was funny all the patterns to keep you on
Virtue signaling is when you stop giving people your money because you don't like what they do.
It's hilarious how mad the hogs get when you suggest maybe not supporting their powerful daddies. It doesn't matter which daddy it is, inevitably taking your ball and going home is 'virtue signaling'
I canceled all services and deleted my account with OpenAI right after the announcement. They can get money from the current US regime but I will not contribute to their violations of the constitution.
It's frustrating. Sam Altman already has everything. He's a billionaire, he can buy literally anything he wants, he can live anywhere he wants, he can buy a brand new sports car every day just to blow it up, he can buy a new house every week just to demolish and replace it with a trampoline park. He can afford to do anything.
He can fucking afford to have some fucking principles. He's not going to end up on the street for not being a fucking coward.
Because of some bullshit minor PTSD from a few years ago, I sort of swore an oath to myself that I wouldn't let being a coward stop me from doing the right thing, regardless of the consequences, and by doing things that I think are right it has cost me opportunities and money. I'm not homeless, but it made the job hunt harder when I was unemployed. I can actually feel consequences from standing up for what I believe in. Sam Altman being a coward is not equivalent, he's choosing to do the wrong thing for no reason.
> It's frustrating. Sam Altman already has everything. He's a billionaire, he can buy literally anything he wants, he can live anywhere he wants, he can buy a brand new sports car every day just to blow it up, he can buy a new house every week just to demolish and replace it with a trampoline park. He can afford to do anything.
No, he doesn't have everything. See, maybe he's worth $3 billion. Or maybe $30 billion. But he's not worth $300 billion. That's a lot more worth he could have! And even then, he could be worth $3 trillion instead!
But yes, $100 million is the maximum amount of assets one individual should ever be allowed to hold. Potentially less. Anything higher is enormously harmful to society. People would get used to it very quickly and would work just as hard to reach that $100 million as they do now to reach $100 billion.
“Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH” - Joseph Heller.
After a billion dollars, I doubt another billion will make you happier. In fact, I don’t think another trillion will make you happier. In fact, I don’t think another quadrillion dollars will make you happier, etc.
After a certain point you have effectively infinite money. Enough money to live dozens of extremely comfortable lifetimes. And importantly enough money to afford to actually have some principles. Oh no, he wouldn’t be able to afford to have his house re-covered in 24 karat gold again if he doesn’t fellate our lolcow president.
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." -- Warren Buffet
The original context was very different, about financial markets, but I've been thinking about it a lot the past 12 months. There's a lot of cowards in high places in tech, surprisingly cowardly people. Or they have sold out their principles to be friends with terrible people, which is also a form of cowardice. Hard to say which.
The whole Epstein thing is a really really great marker of this too. Though I'm not sure if the tide has gone out all the way (we mostly know what's going on), or if there's a lot more tide to fall.
LBJ was a real son of a bitch, who, when he finally was thrust into power as president, did something pretty surprising by going all-in on the civil rights movement. Power reveals who people are, and times of trials reveal who people really are.
I think we merely have a system where the best people are selfless and poor and the worse people are rich and in charge. It makes sense; we have a system that rewards immoral behavior so we shouldn't be surprised that immoral people have made it to the top.
Such systems are nothing new, and are in fact the norm. The current system is perhaps even notable for how it has deviated from the past, and in particular Silicon Valley was a means for promoting some of the most selfless and poor into positions of great wealth and influence, especially going back to the Fairchild Semiconductor days. Always been greedy venal and immoral people here, but perhaps less than in other systems of power.
The stoics, people that Zuckerberg and others pretend to understand and follow, would have nothing but disdain for the lack of virtue that's apparent in those like Zuckerberg.
History is full of cowards who are arguably as guilty as the people who committed the atrocities. The people who are remembered positively in history are the people who overcame their fears and did what they thought was right, even if it carried a real risk of it blowing up in their faces.
Sam (and Greg Brockman) want something they do not have, very desperately. They want to win, to be Great Men, to be remembered by history with Jobs and Gates and the other tech luminaries. This is mentioned in Karen Hao's Empire of AI.
They are both a lesson to me that no matter how much you have, you will not necessarily be satisfied.
I'm afraid that AI weapons will follow a similar dynamic to nuclear ones where, as much as we'd like to avoid them, someone will build them. Which means, everyone will need them. I'm worried that we're repeating the pre-Ukraine war mindset of US Tech keeping their distance from defense while other countries have a joined tech/military base.
I never really understood people's need to post these cynical doomer posts. "Things can't be perfect so don't bother doing anything ever I am so smart".
Will a few dozen people canceling their accounts change anything? Probably not, but at least we know that we're not actively giving our money to Sam Altman.
There's not a lot in the world that any of us have control over. Most of us aren't billionaires who can buy a government. Really the only variable we have any amount of freedom with is how we spend our money.
As a former soldier and as someone who married into a family from the now russian occupied parts of Ukraine i feel that this is a great mindset, but also somewhat of a luxury believe. I agree that ideally we'd stand up to aggression and weapon production and that all other citizens around the world would do the same, and we'd live in peaceful equilibrium.
But they don't- and so our best bet is to be so strong that no one wants to attack us. For that, we can't leave the cutting edge of military technology to others.
This mindset used to be anathema to the tech community, but then briefly changed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as people briefly understood that there are in fact aggressive actors in the world and war might come to us. But it seems we went back on that.
This administration has relentlessly demonstrated they will let no law or human right get in the way of their accumulation of unchecked power.
He tried to take congress's power but not even his hand picked SCOTUS lackeys would permit that.
So instead he kidnapped presidents, had masked unaccountables shooting people in the streets, is threatening to seize elections all while covering up countless crimes by flushing enough evidence down toilets that they needed plumbers to come out.
Along with that, defunding science, shutting down research centers, tearing up international treaties, threatening to invade Canada, Denmark and do a nuclear first strike all while building 24
concentration camps and shutting down pbs
He runs MLMs and cryptocurrency pump and dumps from a Whitehouse where he peddles cheap glitzy trinkets from his online store sells pardons and tried to orchestrate a coup.
This is a Whitehouse that uses the 14 words, makes references to 1488, puts out AI deep fakes and fraudulent photographs as press releases that read like North Korean propaganda. One that defunds the weather service because of conspiracy theories.
There is no excuse whatsoever for empowering them.
If any replies accuse me of being a democrat (I'm not) or try to deflect, I will not engage. Being a shithead isn't a flex.
OpenAI step in to work with defence department on stuff so questionable that another company took a public stance to distance itself from?
Myself, I’ve always “followed the money” when the current administration has taken public positions on things from media company mergers to data centres etc. So a bit of me wonders how much of the “anthropic is a threat to national security” is genuine and how much is about getting another company into lucrative defence contracts instead?
Trump family has major investments in data centers etc and is heavy benefiting from OpenAI footprint but they recently declined an investment opportunity in anthropic citing it’s political leanings
What does domestic surveillance have to do with national security objectives or keeping denizens of the U.S. safe (that is, the ones who are not lucky enough to be in its cosseted ruling class)?
This is a good time to promote running your own models. I have been running my own models locally and I would wager a local model will meet 85-95% of your needs if you really learn to use it. These models have gotten great. For anyone wanting to get into this, the smartest models to run recently that is consumer friendly was just released, checkout Qwen3.5 the 27B and 35B variants. They are small and I recommend running full Q8 quants. The easiest way to run these without dealing with complex GPU is to get a mac. For the example I gave, a 64gb mac will handle it well. If you are really cash strapped then you can manage with a 32gb but will have to run with less resolution quants. If you are not cashed strap, then get at least a 128gb and if possible a 256gb. The models are so good you will regret not getting a better system. You can join the r/LocalLlama community in reddit to learn some more. But this is pretty easy. Grab llama.cpp, grab a gguf quant from huggingface.co - the unsloth quants are great - https://huggingface.co/unsloth/models
An even easier way to get into this is simply by downloading a program called LM Studio. You can mount a model and chat to it within 10-15 mins with no experience whatsoever, and no configuration at all.
That said, last time I tried local LLMs (around when gpt-oss came out) it still seemed super gimmicky (or at least niche, I could imagine privacy concerns would be a big deal for some). Very few use cases where you want an LLM but can't benefit immensely from using SOTA models like Claude Opus.
I have a 24GB Macbook Pro. I will note, do get the 'Pro' models, the Mac Mini and the Macbook Air do not have internal fans. The Macbook Pro has an internal fan, and the Mac Studio (bigger Mac Mini) has a fan. If you get a Mini, you might want to get one of those docks that cools the Mini. Your hardware will get very hot very quickly.
Also, because Apple in their infinite wisdom despite giving you a fan, very lazily turn it on (I swear it has to hit 100c before it comes on) and they give you zero control over fan settings, you may want to snag something like TG Pro for the Mac. I wound up buying a license for it, this lets you define at which temperature you want to run your fans and even gives you manual control.
On my 24G RAM Macbook Pro I have about 16GB of Inference. I use Zed with LM Studio as the back-end. I primarily just use Claude Code, but as you note, I'm sure if I used a beefier Mac with more RAM I could probably handle way more.
There's a few models that are interesting on the Mac with LM Studio that let you call tooling, so it can read your local files and write and such:
mistralai/mistralai-3-3b this one's 4.49GB - So I can increase my context window for it, not sure if it auto-compacts or not, have only just started testing it
zai-org/glm-4.6v-flash - This one is 7.09GB, same thing, only just started testing it.
mistralai/mistral-3-14b-reasoning - This one is 15.2GB just shy of the max, so not a TON of wiggle room, but usable.
If you're Apple or a company that builds things for Macs or other devices, please build something to help with airflow / cooling for the MBP / Mac Mini, it feels ridiculous that it becomes a 100c device I'm not so sure its great for device health if you want to use inference for longer than the norm.
I will probably buy a new Mac whenever the inference speeds increase at a dramatic enough rate. I sure hope Apple is considering serious options for increasing inference speed.
The Mac Mini does have a fan. It's very quiet, but it's there.
Isn't between Q4-Q6 the usual recommendation for quants? Can you explain the Q8 recommendation, as I was under the impression that if you can run a model at Q8, you should probably run a bigger model in Q4 instead
I really hope at some point in the near future AI models shrink enough or laptops get strong enough to run AI models locally. I haven't tried in the past year, but when I did it was very slow token output + laptop was on fire to make that happen.
I've wanted to try some of the more recent 8B models for local tab completion or agentic, any experience with those kinds of smaller models?
The big AI labs are almost certainly selling inference below cost and burning mountains of money. With the insane increase in hardware prices, running models locally just doesn’t make any financial sense.
I have a lenovo workstation with 256GB ram but a weak sauce 12GB VRAM GPU. Is there any DMA trick to improve offload performance?
I just can't help but imagine ChatGPT's sycophancy mixed with military operations. "Sharp insight bombing that wedding! Next would you like tips on mosques to bomb, or I can suggest some new napalm recipes that are extra spicey. Your call!"
Department of Defense: You just bombed the wrong Georgia! The people of Atlanta are furious!
ChatGPT: You're absolutely right, and you're right to call that out. Upon examination it does appear that there might have been a mistake with the coordinates of the bomb. Let's try again, this time we will double check before we launch any missiles! :missile emoji:
:checkmark: :checkmark:
I think I can guess what training data it used for the wedding droning idea!
The point is it will be autonomous, the prompt could just be 'keep me safe' which will be interpreted who knows how and presumably no further prompting.
Autonomous just means this narrative is what you’d see if you looked at the logs of the drone talking to itself in it’s head…?
This is giving me strong Dark Star vibes with the intelligent bomb forcing a philosophical discussion about existence and perception at the end.
(Spoilers for the ending of the movie: https://youtu.be/h73PsFKtIck?si=tTm9TidmEMBHsXq1 )
Assuming it's not smart enough to write logs that make it less likely to be prosecuted/ disabled by coming up with fake reasons.
It can just say you were a terrorist because you were an adult male traveling with something in your hands. Humans already do this to justify strikes, likely the AI would do the same.
> Assuming it's not smart enough to write logs that make it less likely to be prosecuted
Alternatively: Assuming it's smart enough not to consider logging to /dev/null a reasonable way to speed up execution times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYvrziE4feI
Story time!
I actually cancelled my ChatGPT subscription in late 2024 and documented the process, kind of as a social media thing because it had gotten so bad and I realized nobody in my family was using it anymore. I asked my wife if she was getting any use out of it and she told me she had been using Gemini and Grok for months because "GPT is very lazy now".
After a while another charge came in for the subscription, but I had the receipts: we had cancelled before the next billing cycle. I decided to try and reach out to OpenAI to resolve this, but they only let you chat with GPT itself for this, which it failed at and told me they weren't in the wrong and none of the information matched what actually happened.
I took this and used it to submit a chargeback request with Privacy.com, which I use for all of my online purchases. Normally I don't have to worry about this because I set a limit or cancel the cards I issue manually, but I had an OpenAI API account using the same card and I had been a bit lazy in using the same card for technically two different services.
Well, Privacy.com won that dispute and I got that money back. It's worth mentioning this is actually different than most banks will do now days. For the most part when you try to get a bank to do a chargeback they just roll it into their insurance and refund you the customer as a cost of doing business, but the actual scammer or shady merchant got to keep their stolen money, whereas I can be certain OpenAI didn't keep my money.
Your last statement is false. A shady merchant never gets to keep the stolen money. The card issuer/bank refunds you immediately because of consumer protection laws. But that charge is immediately charged to the processor. The processor then gets the merchant involved in a dispute process. If the merchant loses the processor charges the merchant. One way they do it is to immediately deduct it from their current processed transactions. If the merchant is no longer processing, they will usually go try to claw it back from their bank account if they have no held reserves, and if they can't get it, they send the merchant to collection. At the end the merchant must eat the cost or the processor. So in your case, the bank didn't eat the cost. OpenAI certainly ate the cost and the chargeback fees.
> Your last statement is false. A shady merchant never gets to keep the stolen money.
Or any merchant for that matter. Chargebacks (from bad actors) are one of the most annoying things when you sell online when you’re a honest legit business. Stripe even charges you a penalty fee on top of that.
Your credibility is shot when you claim that banks will just give you money. They absolutely do not. In fact, Discover has admitted to me in writing, that they always rule in favor of the Merchant if that Merchant responds to the dispute -- regardless of what their response says.
I've dealt with multiple chargebacks over the years and have only ever lost once -- when the Manager at Lowes' showed a check they wrote me [after I opened the dispute].
They absolutely do not just do anything and "write it off". Please be human and don't just rattle of high-confidence, baseless claims, especially as a giant billboard to Privacy.com
> Discover has admitted to me in writing, that they always rule in favor of the Merchant if that Merchant responds to the dispute -- regardless of what their response says
What, always? Like, literally 100% of the time if the merchant responds at all, they automatically win?
That's very hard to believe. I don't know Discover but I do know Visa and that's not how their system works at all.
I had been considering ditching everyday ChatGPT use in favor of Claude anyway, but hadn’t gotten around to it mostly out of habit. Now I have a good reason to do it.
Same, I had put Claude in my metaphorical shopping cart about two weeks ago but I already had some inertia with ChatGPT + Codex and figured it wouldn't be better enough to justify changing.
That has changed, so I canceled my ChatGPT membership and signed up for Claude. I still have five bucks of credit I bought a year ago for the OpenAI API that I do not believe I can have refunded back, so some of my apps are going to have to stick to OpenAI until those credits run out since I'm not going to just donate five bucks to them.
Playing with it now, I honestly can't tell too much of a difference, which as far as I am concerned is a good thing.
Consider carefully the usage limits of both services before deleting your account (as you cannot create a new one later with the same email). Claude's €20/month sub offers very little and this has unfortunately kept me from switching when I tried earlier this month.
I had been using both, ChatGPT mostly for chats and Claude mostly for code. Now I cancelled the ChatGPT subscription and turned on extra usage in Claude instead.
Consider that "little" is very subjective here, I find it to offer more than enough.
I get a fair amount of use out of it. I'm not using it for professional software development, just hobby stuff that I don't to write the boring parts of. For 20 bucks a month that seems pretty reasonable.
You should also consider ollama and local models.
I love that the tool in question is very calm and collected, in contrast with the emotional wreck that is the US regime. I got a very helpful response to this prompt and I will make it continue working on a python script to get my historical chats looking good in Obsidian.
> Ok. So I'm cancelling the subscription to ChatGPT and moving over to Claude because of the news of OpenAI striking a deal with us department of war. (https://www.techradar.com/pro/openai-just-signed-a-huge-deal...) Please line out a good exit strategy where I can keep the information in my chats and projects on my own hard drive.
Before you fully delete your account, don't forget to first save your chats! Go to https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls and click Export under "Export Data".
What value does this give you? Part of why I deleted my account was I couldn't think of a single thing of value in my chats from the past couple years? Maybe some nostalgia looking at what bugs I was fixing?
You’re confusing your situation with others. There are unlimited reasons someone else might want their chats.
Yeah, just curious what those reasons are? Like a valuable thought process you want to keep? Or like a data dump that is useful for looking at later?
Answers to non-trivial questions. Records of wide ranging topics I explored.
You seriously can’t imagine a single reason why someone would want to save their chats? That’s hard to believe.
For me this is very valuable. The results of personal "research projects" are in there. I use it for reference. Of course I could ask Claude to get me those answers but why waste the energy?
Thank you, was just kind of curious. I've never really seen how other people use AI chats so was curious what the use cases were.
Same I furiously clear memories. This is a tool, not my friend or assistant.
Upvoted because you were genuinely asking a question and don't deserve to be down voted for that.
Thanks, but I guess I understand the sentiment. I probably should have not said that I couldn't think of "a single thing of value" when that is a bit of a judgement along with my question. Anyways, it is interesting hearing what people ask it, I think I've only ever used it like a search engine / bug fixing while it seems some people have much deeper conversations or discussions that are worth remembering.
I for one might use these chats as an input for switching over to keep the learning process fast. For me it took a while for ChatGPT to get me. I know that other people delete memories because they want a clean slate experience with every chat. I use chatGPT mostly private (use claud code for work for instance) and I prefer that memories travel across chats.
You can also just dump the localdb
I'd cancelled my subscription earlier this month organically as I wasn't getting any net positive value.
BTW, what's going to hurt their business more, deleting my account or using the free tier?
I've found the free tier to be extremely limited recently, but in a stochastic way. Some days I ask one friggin question and it tells me I only have two questions left and should upgrade. I just switch to a different model.
Just deleted my account. Can always sign up for a new account later if you need (with a different email).
Even with the same email, probably.
They specifically say you cannot reuse the same email. I also tried after deleting and it said this email has been deleted.
I guess that means they are only soft deleting.
The delete screen says they delete your data except where necessary by law for them to keep. Would love to know what percentage actually is deleted.
Ah, interesting. It’s not clear why they would do that, unless they are using the email address as the sole account ID.
They clearly are, and Anthropic too. That's why you can't change the email address on an account.
A few days ago I went to cancel mine and it just said they'd give me a free month instead so I said OK. I thought it was funny all the patterns to keep you on
Just cancelled. I’ll give my money to a company with leaders that have a modicum of backbone.
Steam levels of virtue signaling
Virtue signaling is when you stop giving people your money because you don't like what they do.
It's hilarious how mad the hogs get when you suggest maybe not supporting their powerful daddies. It doesn't matter which daddy it is, inevitably taking your ball and going home is 'virtue signaling'
Deleted.
Anthropic usage credits purchased.
Message those that work forces.
I thought it was only me. I just unsubscribed it this morning.
I just cancelled my ChatGPT subscription that I had since 2023. OpenAI offered me an extra month free, to keep my subscription.
I'n sorry, Dave ...
Don’t forget to change your model in Github copilot and such
A week is a long time in politics. It's an eternity in AI. Anyone want to take a stab at what next week looks like?
I canceled all services and deleted my account with OpenAI right after the announcement. They can get money from the current US regime but I will not contribute to their violations of the constitution.
They use the web user-input as training data, we should use agents to inject it with noisy garbage.
Thanks, I had Claude Code do it for me.
Should rename itself to NoSpineAI
It's frustrating. Sam Altman already has everything. He's a billionaire, he can buy literally anything he wants, he can live anywhere he wants, he can buy a brand new sports car every day just to blow it up, he can buy a new house every week just to demolish and replace it with a trampoline park. He can afford to do anything.
He can fucking afford to have some fucking principles. He's not going to end up on the street for not being a fucking coward.
Because of some bullshit minor PTSD from a few years ago, I sort of swore an oath to myself that I wouldn't let being a coward stop me from doing the right thing, regardless of the consequences, and by doing things that I think are right it has cost me opportunities and money. I'm not homeless, but it made the job hunt harder when I was unemployed. I can actually feel consequences from standing up for what I believe in. Sam Altman being a coward is not equivalent, he's choosing to do the wrong thing for no reason.
> It's frustrating. Sam Altman already has everything. He's a billionaire, he can buy literally anything he wants, he can live anywhere he wants, he can buy a brand new sports car every day just to blow it up, he can buy a new house every week just to demolish and replace it with a trampoline park. He can afford to do anything.
No, he doesn't have everything. See, maybe he's worth $3 billion. Or maybe $30 billion. But he's not worth $300 billion. That's a lot more worth he could have! And even then, he could be worth $3 trillion instead!
But yes, $100 million is the maximum amount of assets one individual should ever be allowed to hold. Potentially less. Anything higher is enormously harmful to society. People would get used to it very quickly and would work just as hard to reach that $100 million as they do now to reach $100 billion.
“Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH” - Joseph Heller.
After a billion dollars, I doubt another billion will make you happier. In fact, I don’t think another trillion will make you happier. In fact, I don’t think another quadrillion dollars will make you happier, etc.
After a certain point you have effectively infinite money. Enough money to live dozens of extremely comfortable lifetimes. And importantly enough money to afford to actually have some principles. Oh no, he wouldn’t be able to afford to have his house re-covered in 24 karat gold again if he doesn’t fellate our lolcow president.
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." -- Warren Buffet
The original context was very different, about financial markets, but I've been thinking about it a lot the past 12 months. There's a lot of cowards in high places in tech, surprisingly cowardly people. Or they have sold out their principles to be friends with terrible people, which is also a form of cowardice. Hard to say which.
The whole Epstein thing is a really really great marker of this too. Though I'm not sure if the tide has gone out all the way (we mostly know what's going on), or if there's a lot more tide to fall.
LBJ was a real son of a bitch, who, when he finally was thrust into power as president, did something pretty surprising by going all-in on the civil rights movement. Power reveals who people are, and times of trials reveal who people really are.
I think we merely have a system where the best people are selfless and poor and the worse people are rich and in charge. It makes sense; we have a system that rewards immoral behavior so we shouldn't be surprised that immoral people have made it to the top.
Such systems are nothing new, and are in fact the norm. The current system is perhaps even notable for how it has deviated from the past, and in particular Silicon Valley was a means for promoting some of the most selfless and poor into positions of great wealth and influence, especially going back to the Fairchild Semiconductor days. Always been greedy venal and immoral people here, but perhaps less than in other systems of power.
The stoics, people that Zuckerberg and others pretend to understand and follow, would have nothing but disdain for the lack of virtue that's apparent in those like Zuckerberg.
History is full of cowards who are arguably as guilty as the people who committed the atrocities. The people who are remembered positively in history are the people who overcame their fears and did what they thought was right, even if it carried a real risk of it blowing up in their faces.
I am eagerly waiting for the afterlife.
Sam (and Greg Brockman) want something they do not have, very desperately. They want to win, to be Great Men, to be remembered by history with Jobs and Gates and the other tech luminaries. This is mentioned in Karen Hao's Empire of AI.
They are both a lesson to me that no matter how much you have, you will not necessarily be satisfied.
Ok.
I completely support the sentiment of what you wrote. But it doesn't directly seem relevant to the parent question.
It’s not but it is relevant to the surrounding context as to why this post has made it to the top of HN right now.
Very few of the comments on this thread are actually about the act of canceling the subscription.
Principled men do not become billionaires.
altman is now and always has been a real POS. anyone who wasn't paying attention before can see that clearly now.
this is going to be better than the time bezos killed the kamala endorsement to curry favor with the regime
welp
I assume this is in response to OpenAI working with the Pentagon (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/27/tech/openai-pentagon-deal...).
I'm afraid that AI weapons will follow a similar dynamic to nuclear ones where, as much as we'd like to avoid them, someone will build them. Which means, everyone will need them. I'm worried that we're repeating the pre-Ukraine war mindset of US Tech keeping their distance from defense while other countries have a joined tech/military base.
You may be right, but whatever happens with OpenAI and the military, I'd rather not be personally contributing money towards it.
I never really understood people's need to post these cynical doomer posts. "Things can't be perfect so don't bother doing anything ever I am so smart".
Will a few dozen people canceling their accounts change anything? Probably not, but at least we know that we're not actively giving our money to Sam Altman.
There's not a lot in the world that any of us have control over. Most of us aren't billionaires who can buy a government. Really the only variable we have any amount of freedom with is how we spend our money.
As a former soldier and as someone who married into a family from the now russian occupied parts of Ukraine i feel that this is a great mindset, but also somewhat of a luxury believe. I agree that ideally we'd stand up to aggression and weapon production and that all other citizens around the world would do the same, and we'd live in peaceful equilibrium. But they don't- and so our best bet is to be so strong that no one wants to attack us. For that, we can't leave the cutting edge of military technology to others. This mindset used to be anathema to the tech community, but then briefly changed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as people briefly understood that there are in fact aggressive actors in the world and war might come to us. But it seems we went back on that.
This administration has relentlessly demonstrated they will let no law or human right get in the way of their accumulation of unchecked power.
He tried to take congress's power but not even his hand picked SCOTUS lackeys would permit that.
So instead he kidnapped presidents, had masked unaccountables shooting people in the streets, is threatening to seize elections all while covering up countless crimes by flushing enough evidence down toilets that they needed plumbers to come out.
Along with that, defunding science, shutting down research centers, tearing up international treaties, threatening to invade Canada, Denmark and do a nuclear first strike all while building 24 concentration camps and shutting down pbs
He runs MLMs and cryptocurrency pump and dumps from a Whitehouse where he peddles cheap glitzy trinkets from his online store sells pardons and tried to orchestrate a coup.
This is a Whitehouse that uses the 14 words, makes references to 1488, puts out AI deep fakes and fraudulent photographs as press releases that read like North Korean propaganda. One that defunds the weather service because of conspiracy theories.
There is no excuse whatsoever for empowering them.
If any replies accuse me of being a democrat (I'm not) or try to deflect, I will not engage. Being a shithead isn't a flex.
OpenAI step in to work with defence department on stuff so questionable that another company took a public stance to distance itself from?
Myself, I’ve always “followed the money” when the current administration has taken public positions on things from media company mergers to data centres etc. So a bit of me wonders how much of the “anthropic is a threat to national security” is genuine and how much is about getting another company into lucrative defence contracts instead?
Trump family has major investments in data centers etc and is heavy benefiting from OpenAI footprint but they recently declined an investment opportunity in anthropic citing it’s political leanings
What does domestic surveillance have to do with national security objectives or keeping denizens of the U.S. safe (that is, the ones who are not lucky enough to be in its cosseted ruling class)?
True, but I'm talking about the autonomous AI weapon question
Unfortunately it's the same people asking for both, so you should be wondering at whom those weapons are really intended to be pointed.