My take home from this entire drama is that one should not use LLM services for confidential or proprietary information as they all seem to be run by assholes. And you’re sending them everything you are doing. Would you send your lab notebook to an asshole? Hell no.

I say that as a mathematician (on paper) who perhaps surprisingly doesn’t give a crap about the problem itself.

> one should not use LLM services for confidential or proprietary information

That’s obvious, isn’t it? Just like you wouldn’t upload your confidential documents to an online spellchecker, or your proprietary code to an online compiler?

Or if you're going to trust one of them, maybe it shouldn't be OpenAI

Or use Lumo from Proton. Are there any other privacy first companies offering LLMs?

That they do it is just concerning to me in that it says that home-ran models just aren't good enough. Surely researchers like this have the processing power to run them at home, they just don't have the processing power to train models of comparable level.

This is something I feared would happen and where open source would be left behind. Maybe they can do something with crowd-sourcing computational power from volunteirs. They were after all able to get Leela Chess Zero to be comparable to AlphaZero by training from volunteer processing power but it seems to me we live in a world now where the best models keep their stuff closed.

In imagine generation too. I'm not sure how well Stable Diffusion can compete in following instructions with all those advanced models that are kept secret.

> as they all seem to be run by assholes.

Wait until you learn how many other SaaS and web 2.0 and cloud based things are also run by assholes.

You know this metaphor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

But instead of turtles, it's assholes.

But more seriously, no, none of what I wrote above is an attempt to excuse or play down the specific role of assholes in large AI companies.

Their privacy policy for normie subscribers says in plain English they use your Personal Data for research. I think it’s pretty unreasonable to use the service and expect otherwise.