I have a theory, and it is somewhat controversial but as much as I try to refute it internally I can't seem to come up with better arguments.

I'm sharing it here hoping to get a convincing counter argument.

The privacy emphasis we had for the past 6-7 was solely because of lack of tech innovation. The best innovation we had during the period was crypto which was mostly scummy. The moment LLMs came out, everyone forgot about privacy

Here's my supporting observation.

- a year or so back, we'd have wanted privacy focused IDE, browser, Notepad, todo list etc.

- launch something with that selling point and nobody wants it right now

- privacy focused tools (ddg etc) are losing steam, and innovation focused ones (AI in this case) like Perplexity is winning.

Privacy will come back as a main selling point, once we've exhausted with innovation. Here's my even more spicier take - don't trust proponents of privacy to push tech innovation forward.

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I've worded the comment not to be dismissive but to start a conversation. If you're down voting please let me know what your thought process is.

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philipwhiuk 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> launch something with that selling point and nobody wants it right now

Does nobody mean 'actually nobody', 'the VC community' or 'the people I hang around with'?

It's probably true that the VC community has abandoned a lot of stuff in favour of 'the new buzzword'. It doesn't mean the rest of humanity has though.

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wrxd 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How does your theory explain that Apple developed Private Cloud Comunting to move LLM workloads to the cloud, WhatsApp did the same a while ago and recently Google did the same?

To me it sounds more that they don’t think they could sell LLMs without privacy and they put a lot of effort to try to combine the two.

For Apple one might say that privacy is marketing but surely nobody will say that for Meta and Google

	▲	politelemon 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The clue is in the last paragraph. These companies have made an attempt at changing the discourse around what privacy is. What they market as privacy to us, is at its core a matter of controlling the data flows. Ultimately their revenue depends on us not leaving their ecosystem which requires barriers/moats to help enable their goals. Of course they have to call it that. Privacy is about people controlling their data, which includes the ability for you as a user having a say in where your data is sent, used, and processed. All implementations mentioned above fail here.

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cess11 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What do you mean by "innovation"? We've had databases before, having one with a probabilistic query language isn't very far off from where we were.

If you don't care about privacy, send nudes.

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croes 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> don't trust proponents of privacy to push tech innovation forward.

Why should they?