4 ms·
Users don’t care about “privacy”. If they did, Meta and Alphabet wouldn’t be worth $1T+. Users really don’t matter at all. The revenue for AI companies will
by raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Users don’t care about “privacy”. If they did, Meta and Alphabet wouldn’t be worth $1T+.
Users really don’t matter at all. The revenue for AI companies will be B2B where the user is not the customer - including coding agents. Most people don’t even use computers as their primary “computing device” and most people are buying crappy low end Android phones - no I’m not saying all Android phones are crappy. But that’s what most people are buying with the average selling price of an Android phone being $300.
- barelysapient 7mo agoDifferent users. Many people care about privacy and aren’t using Meta products. And many businesses care about it too and have information policies to protect their IP.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago70% of the world’s population use at least one Meta property at least once per day. How many of the other 30% are too poor/young/computer illiterate to be part of an addressable market? Every company has dozens of SaaS products that store their business critical information. Amazon installs Office on each computer, Slack (they were moving away from Chime when I left), and the sales department uses SalesForce - SA’s and Professional Services (former employee). The addressable market of even companies that care about privacy is not a large addressable market. How long will it be before computers become cheap enough that can run even GPT 4 level LLMs that companies will give it to all of their developers?
- innagadadavida 7mo agoThese are all great statistics, but how do you explain ClawdBot explosion. Even in lower income countries like China. So much demand that Apple can’t keep up production of Mac Minis. Why aren’t these folks going towards cloud solutions? Is it cost or is there some consideration for having more control over their data?
- zozbot234 7mo agoClawBot doesn't generally run the model locally, it just talks to remote APIs. No different than any other agentic harness. You could run a local model on the same Mac Mini as your agent, but it wouldn't be very smart and many agentic tasks around computer GUI/browser use, etc. would be out of reach.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoAnd people using Clawdbot are still not using local inference for the most part… They aren’t buying high end $2000+ Mac Minis.
- bigyabai 7mo ago> Why aren’t these folks going towards cloud solutions? They are. The majority aren't doing inference on a Mac Mini, but instead using it as a local host for cloud-based inference. You could have the same general experience on a $200 Chromebook or $300 Windows box.
- victorbjorklund 7mo agoThey are running cloud models in almost all cases. Like saying it isn’t cloud when you use the Facebook app on your phone (it is ON your phone and running there).
- JambalayaJimbo 7mo agoThe banking industry absolutely does care about privacy of their business data btw. We do use tools like Confluence but they're all hosted in our own data centers.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoAnd Capital One and Goldman Sachs are both hosted on AWS…
- Aissen 7mo agoWhat's the plan to migrate off of it ? https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/data-center-end-of-life#data-center-eol-general-questions https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/data-center-end-of-life#...
- amelius 7mo ago> Different users. Many people care about privacy and aren’t using Meta products. Yeah but if they can rake in 100x as much by making products for people who don't care about privacy, then why spend time developing stuff for people who care? There is still a small market left, of course, but that market will not have the billions of R&D behind it.
- woopsn 7mo agoIt's largely out of Meta's hands now anyway. The risk here not so much to privacy (it's Apple) but they'll walled garden the model space somehow for sure.
- bigyabai 7mo ago> but they'll walled garden the model space somehow for sure. People have said this since Pytorch was published and it's not any more true now than it was 10 years ago.
- abu_ameena 7mo agoI see it as a long-term tradeoff on user freedom. You pay upfront for a capable hardware, you get your services running locally (you don’t pay subscriptions). Or you buy cheap hardware, you still need the same services “running in some cloud” for $X monthly. X goes up depending on the corporate bottom-line
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoIn the history of cloud computing, prices have mostly only come down especially as inference becomes a commodity. Realistically, just looking at Mac prices, the cost of a computer with decent local inference would be around $6000 per person. The world is not moving back to on prem.
- esseph 7mo ago> The world is not moving back to on prem. Lol, you should tell my customers (that are moving back on prem) that! You should also tell Microsoft, who just yesterday said they are going back to focusing on local apps.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoYour customers are an anecdote, now compare that to the publicly reported numbers from AWS, GCP and Azure where they all say the only thing keeping them from growing more is the chip shortage.
- esseph 7mo agoOh I'm sure they'll continue to have some cloud services, no doubt. But look at VMware for example, even after the insane price increases. Nutanix also seems to be doing quite well. I'm seeing a fair amount of on-prem bare metal k8s too.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoAgain - anecdotes is not data. We have data. That would be about as silly as me citing my own experience as proof that “everyone is moving to AWS” when I work for a company that is exclusively an AWS partner consulting company.
- DesiLurker 7mo agoyou are missing a but 'given a choice' disclaimer. Meta is pretty much a monopoly in social space. So is Android. given a choice people will absolutely gravitate towards not-always-snooping device. most people with resources anyway, who matter for the AI adoption. Oh an wait till ad companies start selling your healthcare data and you will see how fast things turn 'given a choice'.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoPeople A) don’t have to use Meta and B) do have a choice between not using a mobile phone by an ad tech company.
- nozzlegear 7mo agoPeople don't have a choice between Facebook and not-Facebook-but-still-has-all-of-your-friends-and-family. Abstinence isn't a choice here any more than shutting off your cell phone service is a choice; true in the literal sense, but only if you don't mind being unreachable to everyone who still has a phone.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoAnd they do have a choice on proactively giving FB more information than just what it infers
- roadside_picnic 7mo ago> Users don’t care about “privacy”. I worked for a research focused AI startup that had a strict "no external LLM" policy for code touching our core research. You're right that the average consumer doesn't care about privacy, but there are many, many users who do. The average consumer also don't have a desktop with GPU or high end Mac Studio, but that doesn't mean there aren't many people working with AI how do have these things. If we continue to see improvements in running local models, and RAM prices continue to fall as they have in the last month, then suddenly you don't have to worry about token counts any more and can be much more trusting of your agents since they are fully under your control.
- charcircuit 7mo agoThose users are addressed by being able to rent their own exclusive machines to run the model on. There will be some compromise that will be made to get access to the best intelligence available.
- Angostura 7mo agoIt’s not all or nothing there ads trade offs. The fact that Apple still bothers to expend marketing effort on its privacy chops suggests significant numbers of people still do care.
- ilovecake1984 7mo agoUsers here probably means corporations. I still don’t see much use of LLMs in my personal life, other than one thing. Googling stuff in a foreign language.
- api 7mo ago"Users" is a large set of people. Many don't care about privacy, but some do. There's also a difference between where you post random social media stuff vs what you run with something like OpenClaw and give access to your machine.
- Nevermark 7mo agoHave you done A/B tests to see if consumers prefer Facebook with or without privacy? No? What? Oh, you can't? Neither can consumers. Most consumers are very aware of the lack of privacy, the manipulation, and have very cynical feelings about Facebook and similar companies. But it's where their friends and family are. For most people the web is a mine field maze where basic things they want are compromised everywhere. And they are routinely creeped out by ads that reveal they know them far too personally. You are mistaking network capture for preference. Another telling example. Lots of privacy valuing technical people, who would never have a Facebook account, send unencrypted text emails. It is network capture, not preference.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoConsumers pro actively tell Facebook their age, sexual preference, race, relationship status, likes and dislikes, they check in to where they are and who they are there with… They are choosing to give Facebook info.
- Nevermark 7mo ago> They are choosing to give Facebook info. Yes, they do. That's is exactly the phenomena my comment addressed. But the way you wrote that implies an improbable motivation or choice framing. Perhaps their real motive/choice is to share with other people on the site. It is called a network effect. If (1) Facebook had been the surveillance/manipulation capital of the world from inception, (2) an equally inviting privacy protecting site took off at the same time, and (3) everyone chose Facebook over E2EE anyway, then sure, we could throw up our hands! Those silly users! The term I have for when people discuss choices involving many-dimensional criteria, as if the choice involved just one or two selected dimensions, is "dimension blindness". It happens in a lot of heated discussions about phone choices too.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoWouldn’t the most obvious way for people to protect their privacy while using FB if they cared and still wanted to use FB be not to proactively give them information? You don’t have to share everything I mentioned just to be involved in a group.
- barkerja 7mo agoUser's care about privacy when they understand the threat and impact. The issue is most user's don't understand this, especially when it comes to use of products like Meta where on the surface, everything appears harmless.
- duxup 7mo agoYeah I agree, I fear users don’t care “enough” about privacy that it will matter. :( Care at all sure, but enough to make a difference, the history of the web and recent computing history indicates otherwise.