Comment by Aurornis
1 year ago
Most people value privacy, but they’re practical about it.
The odds of a cloud server leaking my information is non-zero, but it’s very small. A government entity could theoretically get to it, but they would be bored to tears because I have nothing of interest to them. So practically speaking, the threat surface of cloud hosting is an acceptable tradeoff for the speed and ease of use.
Running things at home is fun, but the hosted solutions are so much faster when you actually want to get work done. If you’re doing some secret sensitive work or have contract obligations then I could understand running it locally. For most people, trying to secure your LLM interactions from the government isn’t a priority because the government isn’t even interested.
Legally, the government could come and take your home server too. People like to have fantasies about destroying the server during a raid or encrypting things, but practically speaking they’ll get to it or lock you up if they want it.
What about privacy from enriching other entities through contributions to their models, with thoughts concieved from your own mind? A non-standard way of thinking about privacy, sure. But I look forward to the ability to improve an offline model of my own with my own thoughts and intellect—rather than giving it away to OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/Apple/DeepSeek/whoever.
If the odds are so small, how come there are numerous password dumps? Your credentials may well be in them.