Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Their privacy angle is 100% the reason they haven't managed to make a decent LLM.

To make a decent LLM you need to ignore data protection and throw all available text into a huge model. If your morals don't let you do that, then you can't make your own LLM.

View on HN

But you can partner with a 3rd party to submit all that text to, and pretend your still privacy conscience? Pretty sure people would rather Apple build a first party server based option than partner with anyone else. When it's Apple violating privacy people are more chill about it.

Or you get the model and host it on your own hardware. The sort of thing an Apple might be able to do.

> If your morals don't let you do that, then you can't make your own LLM.

You're reaching, a lot. Apple is more privacy-friendly than most companies at the moment - no argument there, but they still sell your privacy on the web to Google in exchange for a 36% cut of advertising revenue [1] which amounts to ~$20 billion [2], or a rather petty amount of ~$10/device [3].

These same "morals" also allow them to hand over data on all Chinese citizens to the CCP, among countless other privacy-destroying compromises they have to make in order to profit from the Chinese market [4]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-a...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-... (https://archive.is/oPg1C)

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23583501/apple-iphone-ipad...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce... (https://archive.is/MQmY7)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com