Comment by sonink
12 hours ago
Its a bit wild to me that there hasnt been a pushback against enabling memories by frontier AI companies. This data is something advertisers could only dream off. Before AI, most of this data was approximated by whatever little information could be gleaned from the websites we visit. But now people are handing over their deepest darkest secrets and pretty much EVERYTHING to AI on a platter.
Maybe its just me who is paranoid because I happen to spend a fair bit of time in the advertising world, but the first thing I did when memory was launched on Claude/Chatgpt - was to switch them off. And it helps that they are not even useful, and would actually downgrade your experience by polluting the context of irrelevant details. I go one step ahead - if there is a personal discussion you want to have - maybe use another account like provided by the likes of companies like openrouter etc.
I would argue that we should have regulation that should prohibit the storage of user profile information by AI companies, and any such memories feature should exclusively reside on the users servers. Infact, maybe go one step ahead, that 'memory' firms cannot be owned by AI firms and vice versa.
I've found memory somewhat useful as i don't need to give it all the context for everything, that said it's equally as annoying when it latches onto something I said in a different chat and derails the conversation because of that.
Data harvesting is one of the core value propositions for many of these companies (from the investor's perspective).
Companies that built their models on public data and illegal scraping/copyrighted works, amassing massive datasets on the most private aspects of countless individuals, and creating a huge bubble with potentially humongous implications upon implosion. Oh, and, increasing wealth concentration and inequality by an incredible amount.
The future is here.
I think there will eventually be pushback from companies that want to keep their IP secrets. The current standard of "we dont train on your data" but we summarize all your input and output, meaning its not your data anymore and we can train on that.