AFAIK reverting region to UK wont work. First of all you cant change regions more often than a year (or close to it).

Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.

What does the region even do? why not just stay in france mode?

Region affects pricing, what payments methods are availanle or accepted and also what apps are available. Some banks, government service apps and few commercial companies limit apps to certain regions.

Unlike Android there are way more hassle in installing iOS apps under different accounts with different regions. On Android I just have 5 diffetent accounts with different billing countries and it just work.

Also AFAIK iCloud family features dont work cross-region.

You can just register US Apple account or switch region to US and not bother with UK regulations.

Only disadvantage that you will need to pay fot services via US gift cards as you need US bank cards otherwise.

You can change billing details to US and then activate US gift card that you can buy of Amazon.com.

But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.

So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.

Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.

Create a new account and reset. If you aren't willing due to the friction involved then it's time to decentralize anyway. If it's due to previous payments or licenses/subscriptions tied to the account then work with the vendor to transfer or pay the small cost to reset.

After spending 8-12 years in a single gmail account I learned my lesson. Don't get entrenched or you can't be flexible.

> they dont have automatic detection

I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.

Might be in case of moving region to EU there are something like this, but to move it to US all you need is US gift card.

What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.

Apple routinely removes VPNs and other apps from App Store in Russia even though they supposedly left the market in 2022.

They obvioualy never ever resisted anything except its a good PR stunt.

Apple doesn't KYC in Russia though

We are quickly heading to a world where governments want us to KYC everything, and we saw with the Revolut breach what happens when very, very bad people gain access to our private data.

Whole point is that Apple routinely execute government orders from the most repressive regime on earth after North Korea. And from bloodiest one in last two decades.

Even though they have zero presence in a country.

IMHO its obviously: they cant compete with SotA models in benchmaxxing. They can and do compete on price though.

I think most important thing is that Nvidia doesnt want to give 100% of market to frontier AI labs either.

It's way too easy for 1T+ frontier labs to ditch Nvidia. So Nvidia will also put effort to make sure there are open weights models and local hardware available.

And Apple will benefit from this too.

Quite obviously frontier models dont have any control or even access to infra inference runs at. And weights are also encrypted and locked on GPUs / TPUs.

This is exact reasom why 99.9% of AI fearmongering is complete bullshit.

I believe that OpenAI & Anthropic have tried to make it so that models don't have such access. Whether or not they actually don't depends on the security of rather a lot of software. One thing we've learned is that if there are security holes, we can't rely on the AIs missing them.

Rocket science is not required to completely isolate inference servers from whatever infratructure "agents" runs on.

After all it can be just some GPU server spewing text over network. Like there are no way to connect back to it.

Nothing except inference running on servers with GPU so there just nothing to "hack".

There has to be a way to connect back to it for the model to be able to take input.

What worries me is the non-frontier models, which is what the frontier models eventually become.

The small open models are getting better and better too.

And why worry so much about a frontier models - own weights. The model doesn’t - actually don’t quote me on that, maybe it does.

If a model does something sneaky, it could easily grab the weights for a small model and run it on foreign, compromised infrastructure.

AI virus’ are a thing of the future, but not a sci-fi future, and real one.

Maybe one reason it’s so scary is the murky origin of COVID-19.

You have an unreasonable trust in software layers.

I dont have any unreasonable trust in software. I just understand that nothing LLM sphew out actually runs on either GPU or hardware that GPU plugged into.

Neither LLM weights aware of any of the code it runs on.

I'm sorry to prolong this thread, but what I mean is: networks are just software layers, the operational systems, the driver code, the firewalls, switches, the other server, the sandboxes, the TPM. That and all security policies we put on them. All software layers waiting to suffer a buffer overflow.

Just needs 1 agent to find the decryption keys. They must be somewhere no?

Decryption keys are backed into GPU. Learn about how trusted compute works on Nvidia hardware.

This is why for instance Google allow to deploy Gemini models on private GCP instances deployed on air gapped hardware.

Have you missed all the breathlessly excited blog posts from all the frontier labs about how they’re using their best models to implement their inference stack?

I bet it wouldn’t be very hard to write an inference stack that subtly leaked the weights into the output tokens :)

This was just rumors like 99% of other Apple-related news.

Speaking of rumours, Apple is reportedly developing a server box with multiple top of the line chips.

I would love to see macOS replacing Windows in virtual desktop environments.

We know they have them for internal use, it seems crazy they won’t sell a box with, 2 or 4 or 8 or 10 Ultras crammed in.

What porting you talking about exactly? Packaging existing binaries? Compiling source code making it more compatible with Wine?

In my experience as game developer and porting C++ code tells such difference usually mean there are something really wrong with syncronization primitives. So 99.99% of the time code does nothing just waiting for something to unlock.

Yep, I’ve seen issues like this before. Run it in a profiler and you’ll see it only doing useful work like 5% of the time.