Probably less so.

The hardware to run it locally would be fairly expensive and would require using a very simple model compared to alternatives. Also much more wasteful if you were only using that hardware for AI use, as you’d be distributing the hardware out rather than centralizing so it’d be often idle and when replaced create more waste than a centralized server rack.

Also, additional per user post-training seems to me both wasteful and not necessary. In context learning is often much more powerful but frequently overlooked.

If you’re concerned about data retention, you’d want to select an inference provider that is listing ‘ZDR’ (zero data retention) as a feature.

For example, a lot of the Chinese open weight models have become quite capable and because their weights are available end up like generic vs brand name medicine where there’s multiple providers serving them with different production conditions.

Because enterprise use will often be worried about data retention or sending data to China, the alternative providers usually offer things like US-only inference or zero data retention.

If you’re not going to use it all that often, a la carte API use is going to be way cheaper than a subscription, probably better results than a free plan with a closed model provider, and give you more control over the process.

consumed 40% of global water supplies. But now it is.

Source? This seems really, really unlikely. Last I saw total data center water use (only some of which is AI) was still much less than even things like golf course watering.

AI Data Centers’ Water Consumption Breaks 264 Billion Gallons in 2025 as Devastating Drought Hits Nearly 63% of U.S.

Golf courses reduce water usage by 31 percent according to national survey

The report found that U.S. golf facilities applied a projected 1.63 million acre-feet of water in 2024

(1 Acre-feet = 325,851.4286 gallons, so this is 531 billion gallons)

The golf course industry points out their use is less than 0.5% of the total water use of the US, but it’s twice the use of all data centers.

So for just AI to be using 40% of all water seems… really unlikely?

Not that it’s surprising you’re under that impression, as even in the headline above, the gist many articles about this issue try to push is that the 264 billion gallons of AI water use is connected to a drought across the country. But the actual numbers reveal that as fairly manipulative as if we rewrite the headline to “golf courses use a little under 0.5% of total US water as drought grips the nation” it’s pretty absurd to suggest the first thing is significantly impacting the second and yet we’d be representing twice the water use as the original headline is discussing.