I expect we will continue to see the big AI companies pushing for privacy protections. Sam Altman made a comparison to attorney-client privilege in an interview. There is a significant hold out to using these things as fully trusted personal assistants or personal knowledge bases because of the lack of privacy.

The only real solution is locally running models, but that goes against the business model. So instead they will seek regulation to create privacy by fiat. Fiat privacy still has all the same problems as telling your therapist that you killed someone, or keeping your wallet keys printed out on paper in a safe. It's dependent on regulations and definitions of greater good that you can't control.

> but that goes against the business model.

Not if you are selling hardware. If I was Apple, Dell, or Lenovo, I would be pushing for local running models supporting Hugging Face while I full speed developed systems that can do inference locally.

> Fiat privacy still has all the same problems as telling your therapist that you killed someone, or keeping your wallet keys printed out on paper in a safe.

They could take a lesson from churches. If LLM providers and their employees were willing to commit to privacy and were willing to sacrifice their wealth and liberty for the sake of their clients, society would yield.

I remember seeing a video of a certain Richard Masten, a CrimeStoppers coordinator, destroying the information he had on a confidential source right in the courtroom under the threat of a contempt charge and getting away with a slap on the wrist.

In decent societies standing up for principles does work.

> Sam Altman made a comparison to attorney-client privilege in an interview

Isn't his company, OpenAI, the one that said the monitor all communications and will report anyone they think is a threat to the government?

https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...

> If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement.

I get they are trying to do something positive overall. At the same time. I don't want corp owned AI that's monitoring everything I ask it.

IIRC it is illegal for the phone company to monitor and censor communications. The government can ask a judge for permission for police to monitor a line but otherwise it's illegal. But now with AI transcription it won't be long until a company can monitor every call, transcribe it, feed to an LLM to judge and decide which lists you should be on.

The tech companies have wised up and they'll continue to speak idyllically about what "should be" and maybe even deploy watered-down versions of it, but really they're just buying time to where they can get even bigger and capture more power before the government even thinks of stepping in. The nice thing about being first to market is you can abuse the market, abuse customers, pay a few trivial class action lawsuits along the way, then when regulations finally lag along you've got hundreds of billions worth of market power behind you to bribe the politicians. The US govt won't do anything about AI companies for at least 5 years, and when they do OpenAI, Google, and Meta will all be sitting at the table holding the pen.

Sam "Harvest Your Biometric Data For A Scamcoin" Altman? Real trustworthy bloke, I'm sure. We should all buy some worldcoin by giving him our eye scans, in the name of privacy of course.

I wonder if pushing for privacy protections is due to seeing such concerns of intrusion on privacy already on the horizon.

Anyone can just kill you whenever they want. Security cannot be granted by cryptography, only secrecy.

You really think that Altman won’t turn around and start selling ads once enough people are on OpenAI’s “trusted” platform?