I know running AI locally is the solution as of today.
Perplexity is still useful on phone as it doesn’t require an account and is easily accessed via a browser.
If Perplexity is used without providing any personal information and with a VPN + clearing cookies and everything else on browser exit, is it enough?
Do we know if they have fingerprinting practices?
If those are your reasons for using Perplexity, why not try DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat? You normally have to perform a search and then open the chat tab from the results page, but they’ve provided a shortcut to it if you just navigate to duck.ai. As for your original question, unless you’re capable of making sense of the scripts they’re running (which doesn’t even cover the data your browser sends by default, regardless of scripts), your best bet would be to read through their privacy policy for their practices regarding user tracking and hope they fully adhere to it.
Great, I wasn’t aware of it! I could even just use that instead of local on my machine or is it still recommended to use local like gpt4all for a computer?
It’s definitely still a trade off you have to consider. The promise DuckDuckGo makes is that all chats run through their servers before reaching the model hosts (OpenAI, Anthropic, and together.ai as of writing) so that these providers only see DuckDuckGo making the requests and not individual users. Additionally, they have an agreement with model hosts to not use these chats for AI training, as well as certain data retention policies that they should adhere to. You can find more information here. Outside of that, Brave hosts some of their own models through their Leo chatbot, as well as a few proxied ones like DuckDuckGo. You can learn about Brave’s privacy practices regarding Leo here.
What it boils down to is that you trust these claims being made, knowing that you can’t fully verify them as the models are running on a machine other than your own. And trusting them isn’t an absolute thing either, you could trust them with basic research questions but not with personally identifiable information for example. You can always use both hosted and local models for different purposes, as hosted models can be more powerful than what you could run locally on your machine.
You can learn more in this thread Add AI Chat tools
Brave has “only” 3 models : Meta Llama 3, Mixtral 8x7b, Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku (proxied)
Also, please use open models on Duck, because data retention policy is better. See the above thread
Thanks all! Topic closed!