Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdcfgy | Hacker News Reader

My take home from this entire drama is that one should not use LLM services for confidential or proprietary information as they all seem to be run by assholes. And you’re sending them everything you are doing. Would you send your lab notebook to an asshole? Hell no.

I say that as a mathematician (on paper) who perhaps surprisingly doesn’t give a crap about the problem itself.

View on HN

> one should not use LLM services for confidential or proprietary information

That’s obvious, isn’t it? Just like you wouldn’t upload your confidential documents to an online spellchecker, or your proprietary code to an online compiler?

Everyone, including the security services in my country, uses OneDrive and O365.

I don’t get it.

I worked in a EU company that was developing a product competing with one of Microsoft offerings. All the code was hosted on GitHub, we used Azure for hosting and all the internal communications were in Microsoft Teams.

To me it looked absurd. But I was almost the smallest cog in the corporate structure, so I never asked what were the reasons for all these decisions.

Or you wouldn't write confidential emails in Outlook and have confidential conversations in Teams. Obviously. Right? Right?

That they do it is just concerning to me in that it says that home-ran models just aren't good enough. Surely researchers like this have the processing power to run them at home, they just don't have the processing power to train models of comparable level.

This is something I feared would happen and where open source would be left behind. Maybe they can do something with crowd-sourcing computational power from volunteirs. They were after all able to get Leela Chess Zero to be comparable to AlphaZero by training from volunteer processing power but it seems to me we live in a world now where the best models keep their stuff closed.

In imagine generation too. I'm not sure how well Stable Diffusion can compete in following instructions with all those advanced models that are kept secret.

> Surely researchers like this have the processing power to run them at home,

Nobody has that power. Certainly not mathematicians.

Yes people have to service the use case of a single person. All sorts of models exist that are designed to be ran at home. Yes, you need a relatively beefy graphics card for it but if your machine can handle the latest video games at good graphics it can handle these local models. How well they compare against these things remains to be seen but apparently OpenAI released gpt-oss-20b which is comparable to o3-mini apparently in terms of reasoning power. There's also oss-120b which does require at least a company server to run but this should well be within the budget of a university.

Their privacy policy for normie subscribers says in plain English they use your Personal Data for research. I think it’s pretty unreasonable to use the service and expect otherwise.

>implying most users read them

You'd think theft would still be illegal regardless of what a privacy policy says.

> You'd think theft would still be illegal regardless of what a privacy policy says.

I wish that were true, but I live in the United States and it is 2026.

The President of the United States rug-pulls memecoin crypto and regularly pardons people like Paul Walczak (who was convicted of massive payroll fraud) in exchange for large donations.

I wouldn't make any assumptions about what is considered theft anymore, at least not when it is being committed by people who have enough money to be above the law.

I mean the fact that comments like this get downvoted is wild.

If that is the case, why on earth would you use it in any professional setting?

Depends on your profession? I sometimes work on open source code as part of my professional duties. Nothing that goes on there is necessary to keep private.

Vulnerabilities, responsible disclosure etc?

You can use 'Daybreak Blue' from OpenAI for that, if you want to.

Aren't business consulting firms even worse? They are explicitly for business and there are known cases where they shared confidential information of one of their customers with another one.

Because it's cheap and easy. Hold for many such questions...

Why is all of the world dependent on tech an ever more hostile US? Same answer.

I have the setting turned on in Gemini Pro even though I work on proprietary code because 1. the setting allows for some (very limited) "memory", and 2. I consider my source code almost public even when it's not open source because I don't work on programs that involve extremely high level of know how or proprietary algorithms. It's mostly CRUD that can be copied in a myriad of ways, whether people use my methods or other methods.

If Gemini can improve based on my code and sessions (maybe doubtful but who knows) and others can benefit from it, that would be a welcome side-effect.

My doctor's privacy policy is a bit more abusive than OpenAI's. It exists mostly because of a $%^&&* legal framework rather than malice, and I've grown accustomed to "if I don't want to die then I sign away these rights." Despite my having theoretically signed my soul away, my doctor isn't selling personal information to my exes or to life insurance companies (though they could in the US; that extremely personal information is no longer mine). OpenAI is engaging in the "technically legal maybe we'll see but obviously unintended" side of this transaction, and maybe that works out for them, but I wouldn't personally choose to be a shill for "it's unreasonble to expect somebody with 'legal' permission to do something other than the maximum 'legally' permitted" if I were in your shoes.

I think those are pretty unreasonable terms and it’s sad that you’re defending them.

Does google docs own the content of docs you make with it? Does Apple claim ownership of discoveries made using their tools?

I think it’s pretty unreasonable to use the service.

There’s an opt out so I’m blade for now.

Or use Lumo from Proton. Are there any other privacy first companies offering LLMs?

Lumo seems the most reputable. There's confer.to, duck.ai, and nanogpt.

Chutes.ai models are served from a Trusted Execution Environment, so the GPU owners can't see your prompts.

Or if you're going to trust one of them, maybe it shouldn't be OpenAI

Why would I trust any of them?

It's either that, not use an LLM, or local-host an LLM. If you can local-host one then great, this is a compelling reason to do that too. A lot of people aren't in that position.

Everyone is in a position not to use an LLM. They may not want to inconvenience themselves on someone else’s desires though. I think at that point you should evaluate your working relationship.

I don’t use them. I have evaluated them and the trade off is too detrimental to me and society in the long term.

It's becoming increasingly hard to be a mathematician, physicist, or SWE without using an LLM. Of course there's always the choice.

> as they all seem to be run by assholes.

Wait until you learn how many other SaaS and web 2.0 and cloud based things are also run by assholes.

You know this metaphor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

But instead of turtles, it's assholes.

But more seriously, no, none of what I wrote above is an attempt to excuse or play down the specific role of assholes in large AI companies.

Of course. I work for assholes. The thing is they’re getting out assholed by several orders of magnitude here.

  > Wait until you learn how many other SaaS and web 2.0 and cloud based things are also run by assholes.

Though it's not the real acronym, Larry Ellison himself has stated that Oracle stands for One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison. He famously prides himself on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com