Sounds like they just want to maintain control over the outbound traffic which sounds rather sensible to me.
Yeah, and probably also forcing Zero Data Retention contracts on those service, instead of the consumer variants.
You say that but that's not reflected in the law, and historically the us government has repeatedly created such sweeping surveillance systems. It's highly unlikely they only made it legal, and aren't using it sweepingly considering theyre on record doing so before it was legalized through the act before too...
And as that's international law... It's always kinda a coin toss whenever anyone actually pays it any attention. No real recourse if violated after all.
Here every person gets $500 of copilot "credits" per month and that is a lot of use. $500 in Anthropic API gets used in 3 days.
The only disadvantage is that copilot cli has a very crappy and limited plugin system. For example a plugin can register a hook when a model calls a tool, but it's impossible to show a question to a user from such plugin.
Also it's "Autopilot" mode is designed to waste tokens. It injects things like "did you do absolutely everything you can about this? If not continue" and it's impossible to disable this without reverse engineering.
(People actually came by my desk to see "the AI", the physical thing. It blows people's minds to realize AI doesn't need a data center, that it is just some computer parts sitting on a desk.)
The big hitter AI companies see the writing on the wall: open source models and local AI rigs will decimate the market for big AI in the next few years.
It, of course, runs on linux. I went with stock ubuntu so I could attach a screen and/or remote in to a full GUI. Having a full GUI also makes the rig more relatable to people who's eye glaze over when they see a terminal interface. "It's just a funny-looking desktop computer."
At 48GB of VRAM it can run basically any LLM I would want to download. Speeds are fine for a single user (Tok/s numbers change based on model/mode). But if I were using it for something like ComyfUI I would ditch the multiple 5060s and go with a 5070ti or 5080 as ComfyUI does better with a single powerful GPU.
I'm sure cloud models will always have a slight edge but most tasks, most of the time, won't need that few extra percentage points of performance.
Yes and no. I bought most of the hardware before the rampocalypse. It is just an AM4 chip on a nothing motherboard. Even today, 16GB 5060s are maybe 500 each. 64GB of DDR4 is another 500$. Add a power supply and pci risers and the basic parts could be purchased today for around 3000$... call it 4000$ all-in including my labor to get everything connected and talking to each other.
4000$ is money but is also almost nothing in the world of commercial IT purchases.
This is just an IT org asserting control over how data moves in and out of the business/government. Its seems pretty reasonable that a company/government would want a contract in place with any provider they are sending data to. Oblivious that is going to have costs in agility and picking the best tools, but this is reasonable information security behaviour.
I'm surprised they aren't taking the extra step and moving to restrict data sharing to only EU based firms given... geopolitics.
But then the story goes on and say MS Copilot is an approved AI... Sad thing to read.
On the other hand, the simplest explanation is that the Microsoft grip on those government agencies is strong and with them already exclusively using the Microsoft ecosystem like all swedish public employers are (including universities), it's only the natural next step to strongarm them into using exclusively their AI offering as well.
> The risks of unregulated AI use have been noted within a number of authorities where there has also been reason to take other measures.
> Among them is the Swedish Transport Administration, where the internal audit earlier this year discovered widespread and risky use of about ten different AI services and wrote as follows:
> "We have seen several examples of problematic use of open AI services. The examples concern both the sensitivity of the information entered and how the AI-generated responses have been handled."
> Some staff will continue to have access to a dedicated platform for AI assistants—developed in-house by the Government Offices—which provides access to ChatGPT and Claude.
> Internal information also indicates that, following a review, security measures for the approved tool Copilot have been strengthened. However, the press office has declined to provide details regarding these enhancements, citing security considerations.
I would suspect those headlines caused public officials to investigate how the public sector employees actually use AI chatbots.
I can't fathom why they would willingly try to migrate such critical operations away from a secure state-run system. I'm sure that system sucks in some ways. But those issues can be worked on, surely.
In the end, if employees are dissatisfied with Copilot, blocking Anthropic and OpenAI will just make people switch to their personal devices and use those services on their smartphones if necessary.
It's not about the model or who gets the bribe, like a few folks in this thread imply, it's simply the guarantees that Microsoft is able to give to a public institution about what happens to their data.
> Microsoft is shoving Copilot down everyones throat
This is most likely the key thing. At least here in Europe, already having the processor agreements set up - and Microsoft actually at least trying to do the bare minimum regarding compliance - is worth a lot, even for a nominally inferior product.
Across the bridge, in Denmark, we've already seen a number of cases where government employees have use various AIs to help them do their job (and in many case used an AI to fail at doing their job). The result has been information about citizens just being entered into whatever AI the employee fancied, without worry about leaking private and sensitive information. I'm not entirely convinced that the public employees strictly speaking needs an AI, but if they are going to use one regardless, it makes sense that it's one that has been approved, whatever that might mean.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/gateways
Seems like a good way to govern usage to an alternate model provider
Limiting the amount of tools sounds like a sane default in most cases.
Nothing in this necessarily say anything about one of the tools doing a better job than the other in this regard. It might say a little bit about trust though, warranted or not.
Some of my favorites: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
Meh
Make no mistake, using AI can be quite helpful and sometimes is necessary. What I mean by “AI” is the way Big Tech packages and sells every kind of automation.