Did I just pay 100 € just so I have to pay for an AI subscription? I must be missing something.
As is discussed in the Getting Started > AI Explained section of the built-in Help and manual, as well as this blog post…
… you need to acquire an API key from a supported AI provider. And yes, this is typically separate from a chat account with them.
I use an Ollama server and open source models I’ve downloaded via the Devonthink settings just fine. As long as the model you’ve chosen will work for your machine and you don’t mind a performance penalty versus the cloud solutions, it works well. Keeps my data private and no extra $. Although I think ChatGPT has a free option that works okay too but I don’t think you can use that method with DT.
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True enough with the caveats you mention. However, I would add while setting up the local AI providers we support isn’t complicated, it’s not something everyone wants to tackle.
Although I think ChatGPT has a free option that works okay too but I don’t think you can use that method with DT.
They all offer something free, but it’s often heavily throttled, limited tokens, or you have to share your conversations as training data.
I don’t know about all of them, but I found you can set a preference on ChatGPT to not let them use it as training data. also, I don’t upload any files for RAG, I only use it for throwaway sorts of inquiries that are a little better than a straight google-search. So the models work fine for my purposes that way since they aren’t complicated. Interestingly I find one of the most used things so far with however I’m accessing the AI is to ask dumb questions about scrivener, DEVONthink, or other items as another way to get help beyond the help documents and forums. they (ai)_ apparently forums like this one to meld with other sources. unfortunately it’s also unreliable some percentage of the time - mixing up “solutions” that are very detailed and look good but they’ve conflated steps with older versions of the software or even different software! Still I usually can get past what’s bugging me. I think being able to “ask the AI” for help about your software is a natural use-case. it even references what it thinks it knows about DT4.
Reading the fine print is surely suggested!
And ugh!
@Flex: My apologies for missing the giant title of your post: Is there support for OFFLINE AI MODELS 
However, that is also discussed in the aforementioned section 
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Why would the AI companies offer their services for free?
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For the same reason drug dealers let you sample their goods 
And in the case of e.g., Gemini, so they can use your data to train with.
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Speaking of Gemini, it’s the one I’m paying for right now because so far I haven’t seen a daily token usage limit. It gives you a key to use with external programs like DT, it makes incredible document summaries, Notebook LM is amazing for “talking” with your PDFs, it generates decent videos and images, and a long etcetera. And for 20 euros a month, I get 2 TB of free storage.
And to be honest, I don’t really care if Google uses me as a guinea pig.
With the use via API with external programs like DT, you don’t pay per use?
I asked Gemini about its Pro plan, it says:
Pricing: While there might be free tiers with rate limits, accessing Gemini Pro via the API typically operates on a pay-as-you-go model, where you are billed based on your usage (e.g., tokens processed).
The pricing is set by the AI companies. DT just offers the integration.
I don’t want to start yet another AI debate, but just as a note of caution to your remark here; you may not care, but the authors whose work you may be sharing with Google may well care. You’re not just making the decision for yourself, you’re also making it for all the documents you may be sharing whose copyright and consents you do not have the rights to.
(Their work is probably already in the models since morals are a thing of the past, but we mere mortals still have a duty to our fellow humans even if the tech giants don’t.)
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My Gemini Pro account offers me a key for “fair use”.
However, online is my last option. I have LM Studio with Mistral and Gemma LLMs and use those for first try. If they don’t do the things as I expect, then I use Gemini.
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Thanks for writing this post. I think this is one of the most thoughtful inputs I have read in a long time.
It got me thinking about
- what is the difference between showing a purchased ebook to a friend and making it available to an AI agent.
- is it ok to use the ebook with a local LLM
- why do we have to think about it in the first place? If I give something (lets say a bottle of wine) to a friend of mine there is no problem. What if it is an eText?
I do not want to go into the field of philosophical questions. But with the speed with which we are introducing/using these new technologies, I think we are not spending enough time to ask important questions.
Thank you again to raise these questions and I will take some time to ponder on them.
Well, a bottle of wine is not copyrighted. You do not “own” an e-book as you own a physical object (bottle, car, chair). It’s similar to a piece of software – you do not “own” that, either. Instead, you own a license that gives you certain rights, notably to use the software and (to achieve that purpose) to make a temporary copy of it in the RAM of your device.
The background to all that is that many copyrighted works can be easily copied. So, you could buy one and create as many copies as you want and give/sell them to others, thus keeping revenue from the author. There are also copyrighted works that can’t be easily copied, like original paintings or buildings. The arguments for protecting those are probably different ones.
Making an e-book available to an AI program is akin to making a (probably unauthorized) copy of it. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m fairly certain that many e-book licenses explicitly prohibit copying them.
No philosophy in that – just copyright law. If a work is copyrighted, the person who owns the copyright determines what the rest of the world is allowed to do with it.
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Interesting questions, but I think your framing is slightly off-course. It’s not the act of giving it to your friend that’s the issue, it’s what your friend then does with it.
E.g.
If you lend a friend a book and they read it and copy their favourite quotes, that’s expected behaviour and as a society we accept that (publishers might not like it but we’ve done it for centuries and it won’t stop).
If you lend a friend a book and they copy the entire text and put it into software that can regurgitate the text and ideas at will, and then pass that off as their own work (and profit from it!), most authors (and publishers) would not consider that acceptable use.
I don’t really want to explore it in more detail (there are many issues and this isn’t the place to unpick them), but I’m leaning towards two main conclusions on this scenario:
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Authors should have been able to give consent, and potentially get paid.
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Doing this under a non-profit, open source, community-led project for all of humanity would’ve been very different to doing this for profit of a few individuals and may well have changed people’s expectations around consent.
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Where I live, there is a rule of thumb when dealing with copyrighted works.
The terms “friend” and “non-commercial” are important.
So if I give something to a “friend” (which ultimately means a person I know) and don’t make any money from it, that’s ok.
It’s a simple solution, but I don’t know if it’s a good one.
Not quite. If you’re bittorrenting whatever for free to your “friends”, you are still violating the copyright of the author. In the EU, and probably in many other jurisdictions.
There are exceptions to the copying restrictions, but they do not refer to your “friends”. See, for example, §§ 44a bis 63 UrhG Urheberrechtsgesetz for the German copyright law.
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As far as I know, the question is, are you downloading or uploading? The former is allowed here. The argument may sound strange … let’s leave it alone.
Uploading is usually not allowed because you don’t know who is downloading. But if this circle is limited to my “friends”, without earning money, that would be ok.
When downloading, it can happen that you also upload. That is problematic.
Copyright laws vary per nation and “fair use” is a vague, amorphous clause that is very abused and misused. There is a lot of gray area. For example, copying/sharing commercial fonts is illegal. In fact, embedding fonts in a PDF may be a copyright violation.
When I worked in service bureaus and printing companies, clients were required to provide their fonts to us. Since the resources were being provided to us to do their work, we were essentially a proxy, this was allowed behavior. But if someone said, "Hey, I’ve got a bunch of the new Linotype fonts! Do you want a copy?, that would certainly be illegal for me to accept, even if I just used them for personal work.
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