It would. But it’s a good option when you have computationally heavy tasks and communication is relatively light.

Once configured, Tor Hidden Services also just work (you may need to use some fresh bridges in certain countries if ISPs block Tor there though). You don’t have to trust any specific third party in this case.

If config prompt = system prompt, its hijacking works more often than not. The creators of a prompt injection game (https://tensortrust.ai/) have discovered that system/user roles don’t matter too much in determining the final behaviour: see appendix H in https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01011.

Have been using llama.cpp, whisper.cpp, Stable Diffusion for a long while (most often the first one). My “hub” is a collection of bash scripts and a ssh server running.

I typically use LLMs for translation, interactive technical troubleshooting, advice on obscure topics, sometimes coding, sometimes mathematics (though local models are mostly terrible for this), sometimes just talking. Also music generation with ChatMusician.

I use the hardware I already have - a 16GB AMD card (using ROCm) and some DDR5 RAM. ROCm might be tricky to set up for various libraries and inference engines, but then it just works. I don’t rent hardware - don’t want any data to leave my machine.

My use isn’t intensive enough to warrant measuring energy costs.