When mainstream media and various celebrities have cast Anthropic as the "good guy", it's important to point out.

No domestic mass surveillance. So fuck everyone not from the US.

No (fully) automated killing (yet), but damn did they want to implement it.

This is incorrect.

Anthropic contradicts this, showing an aggressive willingness to work with the Trump department of "War."

Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense... We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems

Depends on your definition, Anthropic has been the somewhat less evil on the scene, doing a lot of research to actually understand what they're building instead of just making bold claims whenever they launch a new model, but it's still relative to huge AI companies. The more ethical choice would be local models, again depending on what you see as the ethical issues of AI

Depends on your definition of "good-ish". Do you mean:

• performance/accuracy?
• ethical origin?
• ethical ongoing operation?
• privacy/future data harvesting concerns?

Running one locally on your own hardware would likely reach "good-ish" with some sacrifices against performance/accuracy (unless you've got a lot of expensive hardware to run very large models). As far as ethical origins, there are few small models trained on public domain/nonstolen content, but their functions are far more limited.

I'm quite happy with Mistrals LeChat. I have not done much research on Mistral but from the headlines I read they don't seem like bad guys.

The general quality of the answers is slightly worse than chat gpt (IMO). But I like some features like agents and document libraries in the free tier

check huggingface, it's got all the open models. inference is pay as you go, though most models are insanely cheap

If you can't validate the answers it gives, I would recommend not using it. It could be giving you complete nonsense in Japanese and you'll have no way to know until years later someone looks at you funny when you say something and you explain "I learned Japanese from chatgpt".

If you have a decent GPU, Ollama lets you run them on your own hardware

If by "good" you mean one that more reliably answers your questions correctly, then no. That's not really what these systems are good at. They're fully capable of giving a solid, accurate answer, but you can simply never trust it to be correct. They're great for chit-chat and bouncing around ideas if you're into that, but it's not an oracle.

When it comes to translating languages, that's one of the few things LLMs are actually somewhat decent at, and I don't think there's much difference between them in that regard.