Comment by SwellJoe
20 hours ago
I like the idea, and it has become more pressing that everyone outside the US think about tech sovereignty because the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data, but the impression I get from Apertus is that it moves at the speed of a committee. I have no expectation they'll deliver a competitive model. At least, not competitive with current models. Maybe competitive with models a year ago (though they haven't even done that yet, right?).
"the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data"
I empathize with this but curious what would make any other country a better safehaven for your data? I personally like the EU's approach to data safeguards, but are there other locales/data protections you have in mind that would keep your data "safe".
The law varies from country to country, but at least I vote for the legislators creating the laws governing my local sovereign AI.
I live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate privacy guarantees. Well worth the money.
I purchase open model tokens for agent programming assistance, and I like lumo+ for everything else.
Another option is DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai subscription, but I slightly prefer ProtonMail’s lumo+ packaging as a product.
Do you go through all this trouble out of principle or necessity?
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Putting aside reliable rule of law, as others have pointed out, it seems unwise to keep your data in a country that has repeated threatened to annex or invade yours.
The rule of law exists in other countries in a way it does not in the US right now.
Can you give examples?
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Iceland and Switzerland are probably the best places to keep your data safe. I'd put Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands after that, though I don't have much specifics on how good they are at privacy these days.
lol the new "swiss banks". store all your dirty data in digital swiss lockers
I think US is the only country that's asked to limit their frontier model access based on the Citizenship of the user.
Let's say Gemini gets to AGI by tomorrow, will my Google account access, or Gemini apps access and data be blocked if I'm not a US citizen? (Anthropic did it with a 5% better model).
If US is classifying the model access based on citizenship, that's similar to treating it as a Defense capability.
I, as a US citizen, also cannot access claude fable.
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Most people have had to reluctantly accept their own totalitarian state will control them. They do not want another state to have the same or even more power over them.
No country is safe. You need to host your own end to end on your own infrastructure if you want to be free.
Stallman was correct in the 80s and is correct now about libre software
From a legal perspective the US may be safer than other places if the US is the one seeking your data. The US doesn't need legal process to authorize digging into your foreign server.
From a practical perspective, I'm not sure any servers are safe anywhere...depending on who may want your data.
I guess you mean assuming your data is stored somewhere in the clear (and whole).
I'm surprised there isn't a lot more attention to encrypted, distributed, erasure-encoded stores.