I specifically like the privacy aspect (even though honestly I think most people in this forum claim they do and yet they rely on BigTech with which they their data, so IMHO most people on HN are not as demanding as you describe) the question is precisely about what to run.

FWIW I specifically keep a page on self hosting AI (you can check if you want to see if it's real at https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntel... ) so again, the privacy aspect is crucial to me.

The question is ... what to actually run. What can't be run locally that would be useful. What model for which tasks. For example coding (which I don't think models are good enough for) typically would NOT need this because one wouldn't share any PII over there, hopefully would even instead publish the resulting code as open source.

So my provocation about spammer is... because they often ARE actual users of LLMs. They use LLM for their language capabilities, namely craft a message that is always slightly different yet convey (roughly) the same meaning (the scam) to avoid detection. A random person though using LLM might NOT be OK with hallucinations when they use it for their own private journal or chat.

So... what for?

Edit: I did use Apple for years, recommending by someone at Mozilla, and I moved away from them earlier this year precisely because even though they are better than others, e.g Google, IMHO it's just not good enough for me. No intermediary is better than one with closed source.