Frequently Asked Questions

What is Private LLM?

Private LLM is your private AI chatbot, designed for privacy, convenience, and creativity. It operates entirely offline on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, ensuring your data stays secure and confidential. Private LLM is a one-time purchase on the App Store, allowing you unlimited access without any subscription fees. nb: We hate subscriptions, and we aren’t hypocrites to subject our users to what we hate.

How does Private LLM work?

Private LLM works offline and uses a decoder only transformer (aka GPT) model that you can casually converse with. It can also help you with summarising paragraphs of text, generating creative ideas, and provide information on a wide range of topics.

How can I access Private LLM on all my Apple devices?

After a one-time purchase, you can download and use Private LLM on all your Apple devices. The app supports Family Sharing, allowing you to share it with your family members.

What does the “Received a memory warning from iOS” message mean and why does it make the app suddenly stop generating text?

Private LLM is performing on-device inference on a large language model, which is a memory-intensive process. The iOS operating system sends the app a memory warning; and not acting on the warning will lead to iOS terminating the app. In the interest of stability, the app immediately stops generating text. If you're running several apps simultaneously or your device has limited memory, you might receive a memory warning. Closing unused apps in the background and/or restarting the app device can often resolve this.

Why does Private LLM abruptly stop generating text sometimes?

This could be due to the device running low on memory, or if the task given to Private LLM is particularly complex. In such cases, consider closing memory hungry apps that might be running in the background and try breaking down the request into smaller, more manageable tasks for the LLM to process. In the latter case, simply responding with “Continue”, “Go on” or “Tell me” also works.

What makes Private LLM different from other AI chatbots?

Unlike almost all other AI chatbot apps that are currently available, Private LLM operates completely offline and does not use an external 3rd party API, ensuring your data privacy. There's no tracking or data sharing. Your data stays on your device. Plus, it's a one-time purchase, giving you lifetime access without having to worry about recurring subscription fees.

How can I use Private LLM for summarisation?

Private LLM can analyse and summarise lengthy paragraphs of text in seconds. Just paste in the content, and the AI will generate a concise summary, all offline. You could also use Private LLM for rephrasing and paraphrasing with prompts like:

• Give me a TLDR on this: [paste content here]
• You’re an expert copywriter. Please rephrase the following in your own words: [paste content]
• Paraphrase the following text so that it sounds more original:[paste content]

Can Private LLM help with brainstorming or problem-solving?

Absolutely! Private LLM can generate insightful suggestions and ideas, making it a powerful tool for brainstorming and problem-solving tasks. Here are some example brainstorming prompts that you can try asking Private LLM. Please feel free to experiment and try out your own prompts.

• Can you give me some potential themes for a science fiction novel?
• I’m planning to open a vegan fast-food restaurant. What are the weaknesses of this idea?
• I run a two year old software development startup with one product that has PMF, planning on introducing a new software product in a very different market. Use the six hats method to analyse this.
• Utilise the Golden Circle Model to create a powerful brand for a management consulting business.

What are the Sampling Temperature and Top-P settings and what they do?

Sampling temperature and Top-P are universal inference parameters for all autoregressive causal decoder only transformer (aka GPT) models, and are not specific to Private LLM. The app has them set to reasonable defaults (0.7 for Sampling temperature and 0.4 for Top-p), But you can always tweak them and see what happens. Please bear in mind that changes to these parameters do not take effect until the app is restarted.

These parameters control the tradeoff between deterministic text generation and creativity. Low values lead to boring but coherent response, higher values lead to creative but sometimes incoherent responses.

Can I use Private LLM with the Shortcuts app?

Yes. Private LLM has two app intents that you can use with Siri and the Shortcuts app. Please look for Private LLM in the Shortcuts app. Additionally, Private LLM also supports the x-callback-url specification which is also supported by Shortcuts and many other apps. Here’s an example shortcut using the x-callback-url functionality in PersonalGPT.