Comment by simonw
6 days ago
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.
The worst part to me is how little anyone seems to care about privacy - it just is how the world is. The US economy (or at least almost all e-marketing) seems to run on the idea that there's no such thing as privacy by default. Its not a subject that is talked about nearly enough. Everything is already known by uncle sam regardless. Its really strange, or maybe fortunate, that we're basically at a place that we often worried about but things haven't gone totally wrong yet. Corporate governance has been not that terrible (they know that its a golden goose they can't unkill). We'll see what happens in the next decade though - a company like google with so much data but losing marketshare might be tempted to be evil, or in todays parlance, have a feduciary responsibility to juice peoples data.
on the other hand, if AWS or Microsoft was caught taking customer data out of their clouds their business would be over. I don't know if AI has anything to do with it, inference is just another app they sell.