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Comment by akrymski | Hacker News Reader

Nobody wants to run Google on their PCs, why should LLMs be different? I'd expect GPT models to be updated regularly fairly soon, and in much the same way that I wouldn't want to host a personal out-dated web index + search engine, LLMs seem a perfect fit for server-side services given their requirements. Barely anyone even hosts their blogs or mail. What's the excitement about getting it almost running on a phone about?

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> What's the excitement about getting it almost running on a phone about?

You get to decide what is appropriate or not.

It works offline.

It can be used to by applications without the having to use an external service.

This can be important for a number of applications (I am thinking about open source games and the modding community right now, but it is just an example)

email works on localhost if you don’t want to email anybody

I think it is important to keep your that in device. I would prefer the chatgpt to work on my pc instead work on a giant companies servers. I am doing very sensitive conversations with it. There is no guarantee of this data to be kept secret by Open AI. Also corporation would want to keep their data in house. Especially it can be a huge problem if your developer can unleashed the private document with the internet.

Because it's a world-changing technology and right now a handful of companies control it.

LLMs are much more than a Google Search replacement, and many interesting use cases require them to have access to private data.

I'd host my own blog or mail if it were easier.

More to the point, I find it absolutely bizarre that one couldn't come up with quite a few reasons to have this be more private, whether personal or business.

Your personal or business stuff in other people's hands is generally not optimal or preferable, especially when more private options exist.

>why should LLMs be different?

Because LLMs are expensive to host. It's more of a case that no one wants to run these on their PCs and it's the cheapest if it ends up running on client PCs instead of your own PCs. Not all use cases of LLMs need a super powerful model that is always up to date.

I think the privacy aspect is also interesting, think about journal or second-brain type applications. These could benefit a lot from language model use, but you don’t want these types of information sent to a cloud provider in unencrypted fashion.

The easier to run it the more competition will emerge.

There are two compelling reasons:

1) for people who want to make money using AI but can’t afford to pay for a LLM or servers, they can push that cost to the end user.

2) for people who want to generate porn or spam (probably, also to make money)

The privacy thing is complete nonsense. If you want a private server, rent your own private server. If you’re worried AWS is spying on you, you’re paranoid.

This is about money, making money and being cheap, not about good will.

So, you’re right; from a consumer perspective it’s pretty meaningless.

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