Comment by pizza234
12 hours ago
There are a few use cases that are (somewhat) surprisingly unsuited for cloud providers:
- translations: cloud providers can bowdlerize (censor) bad words/content; also, if you want to do a translation for personal use of copyrighted materials, cloud providers may block it
- image generation: generating drawings with a style that even just resembles a copyrighted one (ie. Disney) may be blocked by cloud providers - for example, generating old cartoons style with GPT may not be possible.
What about a light but bulky AI job, like batch processing 50GB of files? I'm currently doing it on my used Macbook M1 Max 64gb, and it's chugging through it for the cost of electricity (free with my solar).
64gb unified memory is incredibly powerful for a local machine. Most of us have 16GB which is almost useless compared to the API models.
Cloud does not mean censored. You can rent gpu time and run whatever model you want, with your data kept as private as any other cloud instance you personally run. Cloud is location, with (for some work) wayyyy cheaper access.
Cloud is still not "your computer" so it's probably wise to take that into account and act in accordance with your own threat model.