Knowledge Should Not Be Gated(formaly.io) |
Knowledge Should Not Be Gated(formaly.io) |
There's a massive push to add unnecessary complexity to everything out there, because complexity pays all our bills.
I'm just saying it is cyclical. Databases => plain text => single-file databases, repeat. shared hosting => dedicated hosting => vms => jamstack, repeat, etc.
Can't sell complexity without oversimplicity or simplicity without overcomplexity.
But this is quite a long blog post, with typical blog flourishes, about not very much.
Like, you are letting them data mine your business. Why are corporations not panicing over this?
- we haven't thought about it deeply, or
- we've thought about it deeply enough to understand that humans don't benefit when companies act as data gatekeepers.
In neither case are we likely to raise the alarm. If we let them, companies will play zero sum games over "intellectual property" ad infinitum while humans get nothing useful out of the relationship. We're better off when they compete on execution and worse off when they compete in court re: the ownership of abstractions, so there's no reason to encourage the latter sort of behavior.
(Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.)
Is actual ZDR verbiage in contracts more specific and limited in scope than what we see advertised publicly ("...except where needed to comply with law or combat misuse" in Anthropic's case)? Because those seem pretty damn vague and large enough holes to drive trucks through.
As the customer base becomes more and more corporate (which it will), they end up with disproportionately more customers whose experiences cannot be used to train the model to make it better for those customers.
Either way, corporate customers cannot leach off the training from consumers handing over their personal data forever; there aren't enough specialists in that training set to improve the models with no loss of corporate trust.
Betrayal of their trust is inevitable.
I’m not making any accusations, but we should not underestimate their tolerance for legal and financial risk.
It may be a little paranoid to insist on self hosting based on that, but I’m not so sure that it’s crazy.
How many people would take it?
I know I'd actually be tempted. Con: total loss of privacy. Pro: it folds laundry, and I f'ing loathe laundry with the intensity of a billion suns.
Every business has similar trade-offs they'd be tempted to take.
The implied part the children already know from other stories is:
The magic elves have a recorded history of laughing at their customers when they are on the toilette, hitting on their husbands/wifes and misleading their children into worshipping the elvendom and wander off into the forest.
The story ends in some sort of catharsis for the protagonist when the elves go one step too far. In the happy ending variant Disney makes a version off it is not too late.
i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for personal interest.
the key in any case will be education, because without it abuse will be rampant and progress will halt because everyone is going to be suspicious of everyone else.
Imagine Google search without any links or sources named
This is the “modern” AI chatbot:
It never mentions the training data it used, in fact has no idea what it used (often FB, Reddit and partisan websites)
Update: I added the reply about after the fact Googling chatbots do - it’s different
Or at least some of the sites, if the same info is sourced from 100 pages then it only shows 2 or 3, maybe the ones with the biggest PageRanks.
But those links are Googled after the model started to answer, they are not the links to the training data
Imagine an artificial “librarian” that read all the books and spits hallucinated quotes for you
But doesn’t let you enter the library, open a single book or even see the sources for those hallucinated quotes
But instead Googles some sources based on hallucinations after generating them ;-)
It’s better than nothing but you can Google them, too, while training data (the library) is completely hidden from you, even the public domain parts of it - zero attribution
the rallying cry from hackers has never ever been “information wants to be free from sources”
and hackers have also never implied “information from a dipshit should hold the exact same weight as an expert”
yet somehow both of those is the world we’re running towards as fast as we can.
Mine (WikidPad) died when I switched to Linux, and learned that breaking changes to WxPython rendered it worthless, as none of the dialog boxes functioned after that point. Sure, the source from 2012 was available, but my Wiki really wasn't.
Eventually this forced me back to Windows... but it was too late, now I'm back on Windows, and still don't trust WikidPad.
>Keeping them current was tedious, and humans hate tedium. But the tedium is the one thing language models are immune to. They will happily re-link, re-summarize, and reconcile contradictions across a hundred files without complaining.
Yeah, and you're going to trust the LLM to reliably maintain this? Not a wise choice.
I really wish we had a reliable way to annotate and interlink documents using hypertext. Unfortunately, HTML doesn't actually let you mark up (annotate) hypertext.
We still, 81 years later, don't have a Memex! 8(
This is good practice anyway, and a coding agent can help write the tools.
Now that we have coding assistance, we can even be more ambitious. A common, language-independent test suite would be more useful than Markdown for generating an SDK and then verifying that it matches the spec. So I don't think plain Markdown is the best way.
Normally I expect a set of tooling to be build on top of any open format. Value-adds and interoperability. Instead I just see a way to organize markdown files.
Most of it is just misinformation, after all. People say knowledge shouldn't be restricted, but now we have the opposite problem. There's so much information that just skimming through it takes too much time. On top of that, as we shift from text to video, getting information has become even harder. Compared to text, YouTube videos feel like they have much lower information density. I've heard that the TikTok generation's text literacy is declining, but maybe that's actually a social adaptation to process as much data as possible from low-density sources
In that sense, the efficiency of RAG ultimately comes down to what kind of good knowledge you're feeding into the AI.
Which they did do, but scale is relatively miniscule to the full dataset.
to comply with the law, we must send to the police our detections of illegal activity >:|
a guy subpeonaed your chats, i guess we stored them (oops) so now it's illegal to destroy it...
Plus, open-source models hosted on SaaS inference providers tend to come with a strong ZDR agreement too.
At some point, where does the training advantage for specialist LLMs come from, if not progressively encroaching on customer data for the benefit of equivalent customers?
So if it sources something in Wikipedia, it is more likely to provide Wikipedia as a trusted source for it.
The problem is when an answer is hallucinated, false, it may provide a source for it which contains the invalid info.
OlmoTrace, Guide Labs with Clarity and a few more
Labs train the model with attribution baked-in and they say the bigger the model - the more interpretable it becomes
Pretty sure it’s the future
Well that, and after 2+ decades of this, we can pretty much conclusively tell it worked out great for them. They were - and are - absolutely right to "make such trades".
Yes, data leaks sometimes happen. Sometimes they even make noise in the news. And... that's about the end of it. There are no tomb raiders stealing "crown jewels" and "secret sauces" and outcompeting companies on their own turf[0] - instead, there are many success stories of systems, products and businesses that wouldn't be created if not for the ability to outsource data and document processing to cloud services.
--
[0] - Except the Chinese, but that's not really about stealing secrets or private data - just that owning the factories lets you iterate on hardware faster (+ it helps to have some healthy disregard for "intellectual property").
i’m not sure why so many of us have fallen into this… “there is no other future” thing…
there are other options. plenty of them. there is no singular solution. we could always just say “no”. and that’s that. that would be one option.
why do we feel like there is no other way? why are we afraid to say “nah”?
here is my argument:
technology will not stop advancing. for good and for bad. we will not one day realize that we should stop progressing tech and switch to an amish approach to technology. highly unlikely.
other scifi futures involve end of the world scenarios. in my opinion those are not interesting, because if they happen even with survivors humanity is mostly over anyways, so i am not entertaining those. humanity will survive in large numbers.
another option is absolute corporate control. we are kind of heading towards that, but if things go really bad then people will revolt. and either the people win or we have another end of the world scenario. you only need to look at china. if they are to strict, people start protesting. so absolute corporate control is not going to happen.
the last one i can think of is a multi class society. that too is unlikely as we have been going away from that over the last century and i do not believe we'll ever go back.
as you can see from these options, education has the only good outcome. therefore it is the most likely one.
education IS the way of saying "no". it's teaching our children to not do that. saying no to certain tech development is unlikely because there is no tech that only has bad use. not even technology that enables weapons. education is the only way to stop people from abusing technology for bad things.
For example, we could extend HIPAA-style fines for leaked personal data to other forms of intimate data like location, biometrics, local documents, private chats, etc.
Leak someone's location history? That'll be one $$$ fine per incident where an incident is one person data point.
This at the very least converts this kind of data from an asset into a potential liability, incentivizing companies to not collect it, not hold it long, or thoroughly anonymize and aggregate it and then discard specifics.