Comment by sigmaisaletter
1 day ago
Looks great. Not sure how big the market is between "need max privacy, need on-prem" and "don't care, just use what is cheap/popular" tho.
Can you talk about how this relates to / is different / is differentiated from what Apple claimed to do during their last WWDC? They called it "private cloud compute". (To be clear, after 11 months, this is still "announced", with no implementation anywhere, as far as I can see.)
Here is their blog post on Apple Security, dated June 10: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
EDIT: JUST found the tinfoil blog post on exactly this topic. https://tinfoil.sh/blog/2025-01-30-how-do-we-compare
Anecdotal, but I work at a company offering an SMB product with LLM features. One of the first questions asked on any demo or sales call is what the privacy model for the LLM is, how the data is used, who has access to it, and can those features be disabled.
There are a few stories on the 'max privacy' stuff; one of the stories goes that you have two companies each with something private that needs to combine their stuff without letting the other see it; for example a bank with customer transactions and a company with analytics software they don't want to share; a system like this lets the bank put their transaction data through that analytics software without anyone being able to see the transaction data or the software. The next level on that is where two banks need to combine the transaction data to spot fraud, where you've now got three parties involved on one server.
Private Cloud Compute has been in use since iOS 18 released.
It seems that PCC indeed went live with 18.1 - tho not in Europe (which is where I am located). Thanks for the heads up, I will look into this further.
Companies like Edgeless Systems have been building open-source confidential computing for cloud and AI for years, they are open-source, and have published in 2024 how they compare to Apple Private Cloud Compute. https://www.edgeless.systems/blog/apple-private-cloud-comput...
Private Cloud Compute has been live in production for 8 months
It seems that PCC indeed went live with 18.1 - tho not in Europe (which is where I am located). Thanks for the heads up, I will look into this further.