Yeah. This functionally worked before without gps. It leaves very little other reasons for them to suddenly need gps, now. This implicates there’s little motive to use the gps data for a local feed but the true motive is something else. The writing on the wall is that this is going to be sold to US immigration “enforcement” agencies. Shameful and disgraceful.
Although I uninstalled the app after the finalization of the sale to those among Oracle, I used to be a long time user of Tik Tok and recall this being a feature years ago.
Interestingly, when this was rolled out, it did not require gps services from the devices, probably using geoIP lookup, and location tags on posts, either set by the creator when posting (i remember this more often than not being a feature for shitpost using absurd locations like gayville) or maybe through some machine learning audio or video to text algorithm interpreting if the post might be relevant to some geographical location if the poster didn’t tag it. I tried to find any mention of gps or location services in the article I linked and its other references, but didn’t find anything, corroborating that it was probably geoIP and some algorithmic detection.
I suggest looking at llm arena leaderboards filtered by open weight models. It offers benchmarks at a very complete and statistically detailed level for models, and usually is quite up to date when new models come out. The new Gemma that just came out might be the best for 1x GPU, and if you have a bunch of vram check out the larger Chinese models