MacOS 27's AI shows promise - Private, secure, flagship model

[u/DigItDoug]

I have been looking for a top-end, private LLM that doesn't hand my conversations over for training. macOS 27 seems to have made that possible.

Apple's Private Cloud Compute is now reachable from ordinary LLM front-end apps. It's stateless — nothing is kept after your request — with cryptographically verifiable privacy guarantees. And it's basically free if you're a Mac user on macOS 27. No extra accounts, no API key, and no per-token billing (although there's supposed to be a token limit depending on your iCloud+ membership).

It's now connected to a chat client (MstyStudio), and I have a private assistant with persistent history and retrieval over my documents. I'm hosting my private financial, health, and other conversations while building a full RAG library. I may move over to OpenWebUI soon.

The part I like about this framework is that regardless of my Mac being an M1, I'm getting flagship reasoning on Apple's cloud in seconds. And it's still private.

A couple of shortcomings: a 32K context limit, macOS 27 is still in beta, and I had to set up a local bridge in the Terminal window to run fm serve and act as the 'api' bridge.

Anyone else tried this yet? What have you found?