For example, if there are business consequences for leaking customer data, you better run that LLM yourself.
There are multinational corporations with heavy presence in Europe, that run their whole business on Microsoft cloud, including keeping and processing there privacy-sensitive data, business-critical data and medical data, and yes, that includes using some of this data with LLMs - hosted on Azure. Companies of this size cannot ignore regulatory compliance and hope no one notices. This only works because MS figured out how to keep it compliant.
Point being, if there are business consequences, you'll be better off using Azure-hosted LLMs than running a local model yourself - they're just better than you or me at this. The only question is, whether you can afford it.
sure, theoretically kyc and aml are good, the implementations all suck.
Microsoft v. United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_Stat...) showed the government wants, and was willing to do whatever required, access to data held in the E.U. The passing of the CLOUD Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act) basically codified it in to law.
Of course, it could be just all talk, like all general European globalist talks, and Europe will do a 360 once a more friendly party takes over the US.
Just hyperbole, but it seems the regulations are designed with the big cloud providers in mind, but then why don't they just ban US big tech and roll out the regulations more slowly? This neoliberalism makes everything so unnecessarily complicated.
If Solows paradox is true and not the result of bad measurement, then one might expect that it could be workable without sacrificing much productivity. Certainly abandoning the cloud would be possible if the regulatory environment allowed for rapid development of alternative non-cloud solutions, as I really don't think the cloud improved productivity (besides for software developers in certain cases) and is more of a rent seeking mechanism (hot take on hacker news I'm sure, but look at any big corpo IT dept outside the tech industry and I think you will see tons of instances where modern tech like the cloud is causing more problems than it's worth productivity-wise).
Computers in general I am much less sure of and lean towards mismeasurement hypothesis. I suspect any "return to 1950" project would render a company economically less competitive (except in certain high end items) and so the EU would really need to lean on Linux hard and invest massively in domestic hardware (not a small task as the US is finding out) in order to escape the clutches of the US and/or China.
I don't think they have the political will to do it, but I would love it if they tried and proved naysayers wrong.
The European Court of Justice ruled at least twice that it doesn't matter what kind of contract they give you, and what kind of bilateral agreement there are between the US and the EU, as long as the US have the patriot act and later regulations, using Microsoft means it's violating European privacy laws.
Yes, and that's why the European Commission keeps being pushed back by the Court of Justice of the EU (the Safe Harbor was ruled out, Privacy Shield as well, and it's likely a matter of time before the CJEU kills the Data Privacy Framework as well), but when it takes 3-4 years to get a ruling and then the Commission can just make a new (illegal) framework that will last for a couple years, the violation can carry on indefinitely.
This is learned helplessness and it’s only true if you don’t put any effort into building that expertise.
You're right, I should get right to it. Plenty of time for it after work, especially if I cut down HN time.
Technically you could probably just run it on EC2, but then you’d still need HIPPA compliance
But at least if you use an API in the same region as your customers, court order shenanigans won't get you caught between different jurisdictions.
For most tasks I don't need the best model in existence, I just need good enough. A small law firm using LLMs for summaries can probably do it on prem and hire a smart college student to setup a PC to do it.
The problem is that's still more difficult ( let's say our hypothetical junior IT only makes 60k a year) than just sending all your private business information to some 3rd party API. You can then act shocked and concerned when your 3rd party leaks the data.