I’ve been play around with ollama. Given you download the model, can you trust it isn’t sending telemetry?
LLMs are not different from any other type of software. Is there a privacy policy you can refer to? Can you monitor the network to see of it is trying to communicate with anything? If you want to be sure, just block internet access. This seems to be open-source so you could also just search for the phone-home code and remove it if it exists.
you can check the process to see if its communicating at all. none of the big ones do. its possible someone could be fucking with the file though, before the safetensors format this was a big issue, and still sort of is afterwards. only DL from reputable sources
Llama does have some details on GitHub about this. According to them, no, it does not send data anywhere. You can also monitor network traffic to watch for it sending anything it shouldn’t. If you don’t want to do that, firewall it.
And if you don’t want to do that…run it in a VM and unplug your nic/disconnect wifi
The only real way of checking is by checking the send packets and/or inspect the source code. This “problem” is not only related to local AI but open source are too
I found this and actually like it better than Alpaca. Your mileage may vary, but they claim that it’s 100% private, no internet necessary:
