Comment by simonw
6 days ago
Almost all of the cloud vendors have policies saying that they will not train on your input if you are a paying customer.
The single biggest productivity boost you can get in LLM world is believing them when they make those promises to you!
> The single biggest productivity boost you can get in LLM world is believing them when they make those promises to you!
I'm having a hard time interpreting what you mean here. It sounds like something straight out of a cult.
An LLM vendor says to you "we promise not to train on your input". You have two options:
1. Believe them. Use their products and benefit from them.
2. Disbelieve them. Refuse to use their products. Miss out on benefiting from them.
I pick option 1. I think that's the better option to pick if you want to be able to benefit from what this technology can do for you.
Personally I think "these people are lying about everything" is a stronger indication of a cult mindset. Not everyone is your enemy.
Well, I've been personally lied to about privacy claims by at least Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft. Some of which has been observed in courts. OpenAI communication has obviously been dishonest and shady at times if you keep track. All of the above have fallen in line with current administration and any future demands they may have to pin down or cut off anyone opposing certain military acts against civilians or otherwise deemed politically problematic. DeepSeek's public security snafu does not instil confidence that they can keep their platform secure even if they tried. And so on.
Fool me twice, you can't get fooled again.
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Or for someone trying to convince you to give your code to train on for free.
> ...have policies saying that they will not train on your input if you are a paying customer.
Those policies are worth the paper they're printed on.
I also note that if you're a USian, you've almost certainly been required to surrender your right to air grievances in court and submit to mandatory binding arbitration for any conflict resolution that one would have used the courts for.
How many paying customers do you think would stick around with an AI vendor who was caught training new models on private data from their paying customers, despite having signed contracts saying that they wouldn't do that?
I find this lack of trust quite baffling. Companies like money! They like having customers.
If you pay attention, you see that the cost to large companies of reputational damage is very, very small. "The public" has short memories, companies tend to think only about the next quarter or two, PR flacks are often very convincing to Management, and -IME- it takes a lot of shit for an enterprise to move away from a big vendor.
And, those who are pay attention notice that the fines and penalties for big companies that screw the little guys are often next-to-nothing when compared with that big company's revenue. In other words, these punishments are often "cost of doing business" expenses, rather than actual deterrents.
So, yeah. Add into all that a healthy dose of "How would anyone but the customers with the deepest pockets ever get enough money to prove such a contract violation in court?", and you end up a profound lack of trust.
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