The AI Proliferation Dilemma: Open-Weights, Data Sovereignty, and LTS Models | Utilizing AI Episode 43

We were talking on Textron Gang last week about the mystery model that everybody's all excited about.

The anonymous mystery model and how people are jumping on it.

And it's easy to do that if you've got a model router or, you know, kind of one of the more modern platforms.

You can just say, oh, yeah, use that one, that free one over there.

But you're literally giving your data to someone you don't know and asking them to work on it.

Now, their work product could be perfect.

but they still have the data.

And that's actually a big concern, I think, from a lot of listeners, a lot of corporate folks who have thought about this, is one of the challenges with AI as a service is that you're literally handing over your data.

And that has a whole bunch of sovereignty implications.

And so no matter how good ZAI's new GLM 5.3, which is, by the way, what caused me to start asking this question this week, no matter how good that thing is, you're still giving it your data or some of your data.

And no matter how, you know, and there was also the news of, you know, the news that Stripe may have bought OpenRouter.

There again, no matter how much you love Stripe, and I know everybody loves Stripe, are you really okay handing over your business data, your business plan, your, I don't know, confidential medical information, whatever it is, to a router that's then going to hand it over to someone else to do some work on it? I think that there's a case to be made that this is a big wooden horse.

Of course.

And that's why Stripe wanted OpenRouter because OpenRouter is the horse.

Yeah.

The cynical case is that it doesn't matter.

That's what's happening everywhere.

And you're giving away your data to everyone and, you know, whatever.

Hackers are going to get to your information.

So it's sort of like it's not a how, it's a when.

And so if we can save some money, we'll just, you know, fix the problem later if it happens.

Yeah.

That's the cynical view.

And I think that might work for a lot of SMBs that don't really have the budget.

And a lot of companies that are like, yeah, no, it's private data.