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Honestly think local LLMs beat cloud APIs for most writing tasks now
I spent 6 months using GPT-4 for drafting emails and blog posts at my small marketing agency in Austin. It was fine but I hated the latency and the fact that my data was going to some server. Then I built a local setup with a used RTX 3090 I got for $700 and ran a 13B parameter model off Hugging Face. The quality is basically the same for what I need, maybe even better because I can fine-tune it on my past writing samples. No monthly fee, no censorship of certain topics, and it works offline when my internet goes out. Plus I can iterate 10 drafts in a minute instead of waiting for API calls. Has anyone else made the switch and found it hard to go back?
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the_kevin24d ago
That latency difference is huge once you get used to it... waiting for API calls feels like dial-up after having instant local response.
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singh.jessica24d ago
Doesn't it feel like you're suddenly on a dial-up connection when you switch back to an API? Once you've felt that instant local response, everything else feels broken and slow. I've actually caught myself getting impatient and refreshing the page even though I know it's just the API taking its normal time. It's wild how your brain rewires itself to expect that zero-latency feedback loop. I don't think I could ever go back to waiting on API calls after this.
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victor_carter5124d ago
Singh.jessica's "rewires itself" bit really hit me. One thing nobody's talking about is how this changes your actual workflow habits though. I catch myself typing prompts differently with local models (you know, more terse and direct) because I know the response is basically instant. With API calls I'd craft these careful, padded prompts almost like I'm trying to make nice with the server. It's almost like the latency forced me into a different style of thinking and now that crutch is gone.
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