4 ms·

I like the idea, and it has become more pressing that everyone outside the US think about tech sovereignty because the US has become an unsafe place to keep you

I like the idea, and it has become more pressing that everyone outside the US think about tech sovereignty because the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data, but the impression I get from Apertus is that it moves at the speed of a committee. I have no expectation they'll deliver a competitive model. At least, not competitive with current models. Maybe competitive with models a year ago (though they haven't even done that yet, right?).

nezuzen 4mo ago
"the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data" I empathize with this but curious what would make any other country a better safehaven for your data? I personally like the EU's approach to data safeguards, but are there other locales/data protections you have in mind that would keep your data "safe".
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  The rule of law exists in other countries in a way it does not in the US right now.
  - SubiculumCode 4mo ago
    Can you give examples?
    - sscaryterry 4mo ago
      Wow, this is a bit obtuse. It is a commonly accepted "fact" right now, outside the US, that the US is not to be trusted (right now), due to some orange guy, and his mates, manipulating markets, running their mouths, doing all kinds of criminal and/or infantile shit. I'd say there is quite a bit of evidence for this all around.
      - SubiculumCode 4mo ago
        Hardly obtuse. It's good to be specific when making broad claims. The graft of Trump is a big problem, IMO, but the claim was larger than that, as being something about America's system of Law and Justice, and I don't see these as being completely busted (yet) by the Orange Man
        iwontberude 4mo ago
        It’s been cooked for longer than Trump. Al Gore won in 2000 and they stole the election. Everything that followed has been a complete fuckfest.
        SwellJoe 4mo ago
        It isn't completely busted, unless the Trump administration has a personal interest in overriding the law. As sometimes happens when some foreign power, or just a random politician in another nation, does something he doesn't like. Or, when Trump has a personal stake in some other outcome. Who wants to gamble that Trump won't decide to wreck your businesses, sabotage your defenses, or spy on European citizens? We now know most of the major tech companies won't object to information requests, and probably won't even reveal that they've given access to the US government. US citizens maybe still have some protections, but everyone else seems to be fair game. Frankly, I'm surprised there's not more urgency on the part of Europeans to reduce dependence on US tech. I don't like it. I'm an American in tech. But, the US can't be trusted, at this time. And, given how irresponsible tech leadership has been, in kowtowing to Trump, I don't see how they can reasonably be trusted, either.
        jimbokun 4mo ago
        It’s not clear whether Europe has the capability to compete with US tech right now.
        SwellJoe 4mo ago
        It obviously does not. But, there is nothing preventing it. The US has given away all of our foreign scientists, if Europe wants them. All Europe has to do to take the lead in tech is ramp up research spending by an order of magnitude or two to match what the US used to spend (the US still outspends Europe on research, even after massive haphazard cuts and disruptions). Europe also has to welcome immigrants. Another thing many European countries have not always been great at, and some recently have become quite bad about. The regressive nationalist right is ascendant in many places, including some European countries.
    - brandensilva 4mo ago
      Illegal tariffs, executive usurping congress power of the purse, Noem funding herself and friends with a commercial from an unknown entity with tax payer money, people in ICE/FBI handing over undisclosed unaccounted money in brown bags, insider trading is rampant, using funds inappropriately to fly girlfriend places that isn't official business, illegally using private money to fund public projects, taking bribes from foreign nations like jets and such violating emulation clauses, passing no bid contracts to people you know, using the pardon power inappropriately to pardon crypto scammers and other white collar crimes, moving notorious Epstein related criminals to a low security prison without going through the courts, avoiding justice for sex crimes of the rich, using the DOJ as a political cudgel, and the list goes on.
    - sinuhe69 4mo ago
      Searching and seizure of your laptops, including your personal phones without a probable cause or warrant. Compel you to reveal your secrets, including your passwords by threatening to arrest and detain you without legal proceedings for an unspecified period. Deny your basic human rights, particularly at the borders, especially if you aren’t a citizen. And more.
    - digitaltrees 4mo ago
      Is this a good faith question? It would take several hundred pages to document even a fraction of the violations. How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. And then violating the judges order to turn the planes around. How about systematically ignoring judicial rulings. How about detaining people based on the color of their skin and spoken language/accent. How about violating the emoluments clause of the constitution by accepting a personal airplane. How about sending your son in-law, who hasn’t been appointed to any office with the advice and consent of congress as required by the constitution. How about refusing to seat elected congress members for reasons for months. How about singling out companies like intel for targeted trade restrictions and then demanding equity in order to lift them. What about threatening to delay or deny a merger of a media company unless your ally is allowed to buy them. What about refusing to enforce the TikTok ban until you can arrange a buy out to an ally. What about a formal market with a known price for pardons and commutations. What about stating multiple wars without congressional approval. What about creating a fake department named Doge that withholds funds apportioned by congress and breaks contracts that have explicit obligations for payment that results in more termination fees and losses than the savings. All without congressional approval. How about threatening to withhold federal funds from states with governors of the opposing political party but not your own? Remember the president is supposed to execute the law congress passes not make law or arbitrarily enforce it based on their own political needs or values.
      - einpoklum 4mo ago
        > How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. Not to detract from your general point about the US, your first point is something that's happened recently in Switzerland: https://truthout.org/articles/swiss-police-arrest-deport-palestinian-american-journalist-ali-abunimah/ https://truthout.org/articles/swiss-police-arrest-deport-pal...
        intended 4mo ago
        That distracts from the point in favor of what, in this context, is a detail. There are always incidents in all democracies with millions of people, that contravene the expectations of rule of law and integrity of its systems. The US has degenerated significantly in the past few years, to the point that when someone asks “can you give examples”, I expect a disingenuous ploy more than genuine ignorance. The list of breaches is so long, that listing it results in numbness and exhaustion of the mental muscles responsible for being aghast.
    - mannanj 4mo ago
      How about spying on, experimenting on, and conducting in-person psyops on a US citizen for reasons of calling the Spy Agencies terrorist organizations on social media and whistleblowing their online astroturfing accounts? My whistleblowing consisted of calling particular online accounts as deep state accounts, and I was reaching thousands of voices. They decided that spying on me in a commune in Hawaii, and then following me after to other public spaces was fine. I'm certain something was put in my food based on behavior I saw in communal meals, and I can't say I took video or photo evidence though I wish I did. I'm of Pakistani descent, held a former secret clearance, and I did not break any oaths or violate any laws though the way I was treated was certainly how the above person described rule of law: our spy agencies for example operate completely without accountability and regularly commit atrocious behavior against US citizens beyond just me.
- MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
  Iceland and Switzerland are probably the best places to keep your data safe. I'd put Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands after that, though I don't have much specifics on how good they are at privacy these days.
  - SilverSlash 4mo ago
    lol the new "swiss banks". store all your dirty data in digital swiss lockers
- jhancock 4mo ago
  From a legal perspective the US may be safer than other places if the US is the one seeking your data. The US doesn't need legal process to authorize digging into your foreign server. From a practical perspective, I'm not sure any servers are safe anywhere...depending on who may want your data.
  - markhahn 4mo ago
    I guess you mean assuming your data is stored somewhere in the clear (and whole). I'm surprised there isn't a lot more attention to encrypted, distributed, erasure-encoded stores.
- AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
  No country is safe. You need to host your own end to end on your own infrastructure if you want to be free. Stallman was correct in the 80s and is correct now about libre software
- OkWing99 4mo ago
  I think US is the only country that's asked to limit their frontier model access based on the Citizenship of the user. Let's say Gemini gets to AGI by tomorrow, will my Google account access, or Gemini apps access and data be blocked if I'm not a US citizen? (Anthropic did it with a 5% better model). If US is classifying the model access based on citizenship, that's similar to treating it as a Defense capability.
  - sawjet 4mo ago
    I, as a US citizen, also cannot access claude fable.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - yathaid 4mo ago
      You cannot access Fable because Anthropic can't reliably tell whether you are a US citizen. The govt order is based on export controls to non-US citizens. You can already imagine Anthropic working with a bunch of shady brokers to "remedy" this situation.
      - bloppe 4mo ago
        https://x.com/AmrithRamkumar/status/2067059417678336455 https://x.com/AmrithRamkumar/status/2067059417678336455 This particular order wasn't actually about citizenship at all. It seems the administration simply believed restricting the order to non-citizens would make it easier to defend in court, but they made it knowing full well that the only way to implement it would be to completely shut off access for everyone.
- tensor 4mo ago
  Putting aside reliable rule of law, as others have pointed out, it seems unwise to keep your data in a country that has repeated threatened to annex or invade yours.
- PeterStuer 4mo ago
  Most people have had to reluctantly accept their own totalitarian state will control them. They do not want another state to have the same or even more power over them.
- kitd 4mo ago
  The law varies from country to country, but at least I vote for the legislators creating the laws governing my local sovereign AI.
- mark_l_watson 4mo ago
  I live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate privacy guarantees. Well worth the money. I purchase open model tokens for agent programming assistance, and I like lumo+ for everything else. Another option is DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai subscription, but I slightly prefer ProtonMail’s lumo+ packaging as a product.
  - eric_cc 4mo ago
    Do you go through all this trouble out of principle or necessity?
    - mark_l_watson 4mo ago
      Out of principle. Also, I am an old man and retired - makes it easier to give up a little bit of productivity.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]

nezuzen 4mo ago

"the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data" I empathize with this but curious what would make any other country a better safehaven for your data? I personally like the EU's approach to data safeguards, but are there other locales/data protections you have in mind that would keep your data "safe".

digitaltrees 4mo ago
The rule of law exists in other countries in a way it does not in the US right now.
- SubiculumCode 4mo ago
  Can you give examples?
  - sscaryterry 4mo ago
    Wow, this is a bit obtuse. It is a commonly accepted "fact" right now, outside the US, that the US is not to be trusted (right now), due to some orange guy, and his mates, manipulating markets, running their mouths, doing all kinds of criminal and/or infantile shit. I'd say there is quite a bit of evidence for this all around.
    - SubiculumCode 4mo ago
      Hardly obtuse. It's good to be specific when making broad claims. The graft of Trump is a big problem, IMO, but the claim was larger than that, as being something about America's system of Law and Justice, and I don't see these as being completely busted (yet) by the Orange Man
      - iwontberude 4mo ago
        It’s been cooked for longer than Trump. Al Gore won in 2000 and they stole the election. Everything that followed has been a complete fuckfest.
      - SwellJoe 4mo ago
        It isn't completely busted, unless the Trump administration has a personal interest in overriding the law. As sometimes happens when some foreign power, or just a random politician in another nation, does something he doesn't like. Or, when Trump has a personal stake in some other outcome. Who wants to gamble that Trump won't decide to wreck your businesses, sabotage your defenses, or spy on European citizens? We now know most of the major tech companies won't object to information requests, and probably won't even reveal that they've given access to the US government. US citizens maybe still have some protections, but everyone else seems to be fair game. Frankly, I'm surprised there's not more urgency on the part of Europeans to reduce dependence on US tech. I don't like it. I'm an American in tech. But, the US can't be trusted, at this time. And, given how irresponsible tech leadership has been, in kowtowing to Trump, I don't see how they can reasonably be trusted, either.
        jimbokun 4mo ago
        It’s not clear whether Europe has the capability to compete with US tech right now.
        SwellJoe 4mo ago
        It obviously does not. But, there is nothing preventing it. The US has given away all of our foreign scientists, if Europe wants them. All Europe has to do to take the lead in tech is ramp up research spending by an order of magnitude or two to match what the US used to spend (the US still outspends Europe on research, even after massive haphazard cuts and disruptions). Europe also has to welcome immigrants. Another thing many European countries have not always been great at, and some recently have become quite bad about. The regressive nationalist right is ascendant in many places, including some European countries.
  - brandensilva 4mo ago
    Illegal tariffs, executive usurping congress power of the purse, Noem funding herself and friends with a commercial from an unknown entity with tax payer money, people in ICE/FBI handing over undisclosed unaccounted money in brown bags, insider trading is rampant, using funds inappropriately to fly girlfriend places that isn't official business, illegally using private money to fund public projects, taking bribes from foreign nations like jets and such violating emulation clauses, passing no bid contracts to people you know, using the pardon power inappropriately to pardon crypto scammers and other white collar crimes, moving notorious Epstein related criminals to a low security prison without going through the courts, avoiding justice for sex crimes of the rich, using the DOJ as a political cudgel, and the list goes on.
  - sinuhe69 4mo ago
    Searching and seizure of your laptops, including your personal phones without a probable cause or warrant. Compel you to reveal your secrets, including your passwords by threatening to arrest and detain you without legal proceedings for an unspecified period. Deny your basic human rights, particularly at the borders, especially if you aren’t a citizen. And more.
  - digitaltrees 4mo ago
    Is this a good faith question? It would take several hundred pages to document even a fraction of the violations. How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. And then violating the judges order to turn the planes around. How about systematically ignoring judicial rulings. How about detaining people based on the color of their skin and spoken language/accent. How about violating the emoluments clause of the constitution by accepting a personal airplane. How about sending your son in-law, who hasn’t been appointed to any office with the advice and consent of congress as required by the constitution. How about refusing to seat elected congress members for reasons for months. How about singling out companies like intel for targeted trade restrictions and then demanding equity in order to lift them. What about threatening to delay or deny a merger of a media company unless your ally is allowed to buy them. What about refusing to enforce the TikTok ban until you can arrange a buy out to an ally. What about a formal market with a known price for pardons and commutations. What about stating multiple wars without congressional approval. What about creating a fake department named Doge that withholds funds apportioned by congress and breaks contracts that have explicit obligations for payment that results in more termination fees and losses than the savings. All without congressional approval. How about threatening to withhold federal funds from states with governors of the opposing political party but not your own? Remember the president is supposed to execute the law congress passes not make law or arbitrarily enforce it based on their own political needs or values.
    - einpoklum 4mo ago
      > How about deporting people without a hearing or opportunity to present evidence about their charges. Not to detract from your general point about the US, your first point is something that's happened recently in Switzerland: https://truthout.org/articles/swiss-police-arrest-deport-palestinian-american-journalist-ali-abunimah/ https://truthout.org/articles/swiss-police-arrest-deport-pal...
      - intended 4mo ago
        That distracts from the point in favor of what, in this context, is a detail. There are always incidents in all democracies with millions of people, that contravene the expectations of rule of law and integrity of its systems. The US has degenerated significantly in the past few years, to the point that when someone asks “can you give examples”, I expect a disingenuous ploy more than genuine ignorance. The list of breaches is so long, that listing it results in numbness and exhaustion of the mental muscles responsible for being aghast.
  - mannanj 4mo ago
    How about spying on, experimenting on, and conducting in-person psyops on a US citizen for reasons of calling the Spy Agencies terrorist organizations on social media and whistleblowing their online astroturfing accounts? My whistleblowing consisted of calling particular online accounts as deep state accounts, and I was reaching thousands of voices. They decided that spying on me in a commune in Hawaii, and then following me after to other public spaces was fine. I'm certain something was put in my food based on behavior I saw in communal meals, and I can't say I took video or photo evidence though I wish I did. I'm of Pakistani descent, held a former secret clearance, and I did not break any oaths or violate any laws though the way I was treated was certainly how the above person described rule of law: our spy agencies for example operate completely without accountability and regularly commit atrocious behavior against US citizens beyond just me.
MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
Iceland and Switzerland are probably the best places to keep your data safe. I'd put Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands after that, though I don't have much specifics on how good they are at privacy these days.
- SilverSlash 4mo ago
  lol the new "swiss banks". store all your dirty data in digital swiss lockers
jhancock 4mo ago
From a legal perspective the US may be safer than other places if the US is the one seeking your data. The US doesn't need legal process to authorize digging into your foreign server. From a practical perspective, I'm not sure any servers are safe anywhere...depending on who may want your data.
- markhahn 4mo ago
  I guess you mean assuming your data is stored somewhere in the clear (and whole). I'm surprised there isn't a lot more attention to encrypted, distributed, erasure-encoded stores.
AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
No country is safe. You need to host your own end to end on your own infrastructure if you want to be free. Stallman was correct in the 80s and is correct now about libre software
OkWing99 4mo ago
I think US is the only country that's asked to limit their frontier model access based on the Citizenship of the user. Let's say Gemini gets to AGI by tomorrow, will my Google account access, or Gemini apps access and data be blocked if I'm not a US citizen? (Anthropic did it with a 5% better model). If US is classifying the model access based on citizenship, that's similar to treating it as a Defense capability.
- sawjet 4mo ago
  I, as a US citizen, also cannot access claude fable.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - yathaid 4mo ago
    You cannot access Fable because Anthropic can't reliably tell whether you are a US citizen. The govt order is based on export controls to non-US citizens. You can already imagine Anthropic working with a bunch of shady brokers to "remedy" this situation.
    - bloppe 4mo ago
      https://x.com/AmrithRamkumar/status/2067059417678336455 https://x.com/AmrithRamkumar/status/2067059417678336455 This particular order wasn't actually about citizenship at all. It seems the administration simply believed restricting the order to non-citizens would make it easier to defend in court, but they made it knowing full well that the only way to implement it would be to completely shut off access for everyone.
tensor 4mo ago
Putting aside reliable rule of law, as others have pointed out, it seems unwise to keep your data in a country that has repeated threatened to annex or invade yours.
PeterStuer 4mo ago
Most people have had to reluctantly accept their own totalitarian state will control them. They do not want another state to have the same or even more power over them.
kitd 4mo ago
The law varies from country to country, but at least I vote for the legislators creating the laws governing my local sovereign AI.
mark_l_watson 4mo ago
I live in the USA and I use a European LLM as a daily driver: Proton’s lumo+ that does a good job packaging a Mistral model for general chat, with good searchable chat history — all with adequate privacy guarantees. Well worth the money. I purchase open model tokens for agent programming assistance, and I like lumo+ for everything else. Another option is DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai subscription, but I slightly prefer ProtonMail’s lumo+ packaging as a product.
- eric_cc 4mo ago
  Do you go through all this trouble out of principle or necessity?
  - mark_l_watson 4mo ago
    Out of principle. Also, I am an old man and retired - makes it easier to give up a little bit of productivity.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]