The mainframe strikes back

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In focus

• We look at the shift away from the cloud and why there’s a silver lining for SEA startups
• DeepSeek’s launch of V3.1, and why it has users split

Hello reader,

Since the launch of GPT-5, my wife and I have been having some fun with the model’s creative writing ability. And by fun, I mean creating truly goofy stuff.

Last week, my wife had GPT-5 rewrite the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, but she changed the setting from Verona to a modern-day group chat. It starts:

“Juliet (status update):
ugh why are the cutest guys always in the enemy family 🙄💔 #forbiddenlove #sendhelp”

I also gave this a try, changing the setting to San Francisco’s East Bay area in the late ‘80s, mainly because I wanted to see what GPT-5 would do. (OK, I admit I was feeling a little homesick, too.)

In terms of creativity, the result wasn’t great: “Good night, Romeo. Parting sucks.”

But I was surprised by the number of references to local restaurants, cafes, and stores – some of which had been closed for years. Where the hell was GPT-5 getting this from?

The problem is, we really don’t know where Big Tech firms are getting the data they’ve been trained on. So when a large language model can bring up things about the past with such accuracy, it can make you a little bit paranoid. And once that data is in there, good luck getting it out.

Which goes a long way to explaining the subject of today’s Big Story. A lot of AI-related businesses – especially here in Southeast Asia – are ditching the cloud and moving their operations “on-prem.”

The main reasons they give are costs and security. It can be cheaper to run AI in-house, and they don’t have to worry about their data being leaked.

And we’re not just talking about data being stolen by hackers, either. According to the people I spoke with, some employees have been uploading confidential and proprietary documents to AI platforms to have them summarized.

This is the type of stuff that causes IT security guys to go “hella crazy,” at least according to GPT-5’s ‘80s-speak translator.

Scott Shuey, senior tech journalist

The Big Story

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