Seedance has a lot more restrictions now, but still arguably not as much, it's probably cheaper for ByteDance to run, and as you said, it at least looks good enough to be worth paying for.
replySora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. Local-first is definitely the way.
> Local-first is definitely the way.
replyi think it's clear cloud hosted is the actual future, which people have predicted for decades. it will never make financial sense to duplicate what you can get for cheap, because it's oversubscribed, with economies of scale and "if we let this run idle it's losing us money" pressure, for hardware found in a datacenter.
this has been the case for a long while now, and will increasingly be so as data centers buy up all the everything.
Local-first doesn't exclude cloud hosting; it just means you can run it locally.
replyWith open models, you have multiple providers competing on inference speed, quality, and price, leading to healthier market without lock-in.
local first usually means extreme compromise so it can, practically, be run locally, because the cost of owning high end hardware is prohibitive. there are also companies providing locally deployed closed source models, that meet certain security requirements.
reply"open weights" is the appropriate term.