[visarga]

It's actually the other way around with AI. If you want to do web-search, you got to disclose your keywords to a search engine. If you want to post on social networks, you are in plain sight. If you use a mobile phone, you broadcast your location.

But if you use your local models, it's more like running a linux box, it is private, customizable and unfiltered. LLMs will reverse the centralization trend we have seen with search and social. They can create a "safe space", "a room of one's own" where we can be creative and unrestricted.

LLMs promise the privacy internet never gave us, anyone, remember how we felt private online 20 years ago? You can't download a Google or FB but you can download a Mistral and even run it on a normal laptop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_of_One%27s_Own

[chasd00]

> But if you use your local models, it's more like running a linux box, it is private, customizable and unfiltered. LLMs will reverse the centralization trend we have seen with search and social. They can create a "safe space", "a room of one's own" where we can be creative and unrestricted.

i really like this idea too. Running LLMs locally reminds me of running Linux locally, it wasn't full on UNIX but it as close to a real operating system regular people could get. Maybe the LLMs you can run at home aren't the bleeding edge but they're as close as you can get. Notice how the technology companies are already lobbying authorities hard to try and keep LLMs only under their control. ..hosted in their 'cloud' and accessible only by paying their subscription. The generation that created the OSS movement and the best success stories, GNU and Linux, are doing their best to make sure it never happens again.

edit: fixed some bad grammar

[monsieurbanana]

The amount of people that will run their own models is negligible at the scale of the society. You also can't choose to cut yourself off from the bad outcomes, no matter how much you try. Propaganda 3.0 might not affect you directly, but the political outcomes it produces will.

[pmarreck]

> The amount of people that will run their own models is negligible at the scale of the society

Let me transpose your sentence back to 1980:

"The amount of people that will run their own computers is negligible at the scale of the society"

(I was 8 in 1980. People literally said this.)

All someone needs to do is to productize a whole-house LLM that does voice to text, runs the LLM, does text back to voice (possibly mimicking whatever voice you want), and you'd have an Alexa replacement that is far smarter. I'd buy it in a heartbeat just so that I wouldn't have to do maintenance on it.

[monsieurbanana]

But people don't run their own computers anymore. A phone on their own is nothing without email maps messenger apps browser cloud storage etc... So yes, nobody runs their own computer anymore. It'll be the same for llms. Can they run on commodity hardware? Yes. Will people go to lengths (including buying better hardware) to run gpt-lite instead of the much better internet-aware cloud llm gpt8?

[visarga]

It will become mainstream in a few years when every laptop, cellphone, web browser or operating system will sport local LLMs. For now it is a bit hard, but only a bit.