Borrowed Brains
#When You Don’t Own the Platform
There’s something I learned early in my career: if you want control, you have to build it yourself. Relying entirely on someone else’s hardware or software is like playing on borrowed time. And that’s what’s happening with proprietary AI. You get an API, you plug it in, and it works—until it doesn’t. Prices can change. Features can vanish. The company could pivot, or your use case might get banned. That’s not science fiction. Just ask Jasper. They built on GPT-3, and when ChatGPT launched for free, it pulled the rug right out from under them. Innovation is great, but if your foundation is a black box controlled by someone else, you’re not building—you’re hoping.
#The Data’s Not Yours Anymore
As an engineer, I always cared about user control. And with AI, the stakes are even higher. Every prompt, every conversation you feed into a proprietary model could be logged, analyzed, even repurposed. We’ve already seen major companies ban internal use of public AI tools for that reason alone. Your intellectual property—your most valuable assets—are effectively out of your hands when you use these systems. And if they’re using your data to train the next model? That’s not partnership, that’s extraction. Borrowed brains might solve problems quickly, but they also come with strings attached—strings you won’t see until it’s too late.
#Go Open or Get Boxed In
Open-source AI looks a lot like the early days of personal computing. It’s scrappy, it’s empowering, and it gives people real ownership. Tools like LLaMA or Mistral let you build locally, fine-tune for your exact needs, and keep your data secure. You’re not at the mercy of a vendor's next terms-of-service update. You know what’s under the hood, and you can adapt it however you like. That’s the kind of freedom that lets people invent, explore, and build without compromise. Utilizing open-source AI might take more work upfront, but it gives you something proprietary systems never will: independence. And in tech, independence isn’t just nice—it’s survival.
Written by Peter Mercado | YOR.AI CTO