I thought this was commonly accepted to be the case that companies which sell access to LLMs are also storing and training on the inputs?

I don't mean this as rhetoric, I did not think many people (except possibly those operating under government contracts, and 'normies' who don't know about these things) were under the belief that their IP was kept secret when they use these services.

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zdragnar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Some offer zero data retention policies, but there can be weasel words. For example, on the individual pro plan, you can turn off the setting that lets them train models on your data, but they still have a section in their terms that allows them to evaluate your anonymized data for statistical and "research" purposes. You have to actually get a signed contract along with an enterprise plan that spells out exactly what they're going to use, and what settings enable what retention.

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023548-how-long-do-... (see the additional info section)

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ssivark 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What about inference providers like Baseten, Modal, Fireworks, Together, etc? I thought one of their value propositions was inference (using open weights models) that guarantees with crisp terms that they will not use your data.

	▲	hazard 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I worked very briefly at Baseten, and I can say that it was a perpetual annoyance (from an engineering perspective) that customers would complain about issues with their models but we couldn't actually see the inputs/outputs. I don't know about the other providers, but at Baseten they literally weren't stored anywhere.
	▲	lynndotpy 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't have any much exposure to the attitudes people have around them, and I haven't worked with them. So I can't really say

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Gud 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, that is not "common knowledge". You are supposed to be able to disable that unwanted feature.

	▲	ForHackernews an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have no inside information, but I always assume the tickboxes that "disable ____ data" from Google/Facebook/OpenAI just disconnects it from your own account, not hides it from the provider.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I thought this was commonly accepted to be the case that companies which sell access to LLMs are also storing and training on the inputs?

The services have toggles to allow prompts to be used in the training set. There is a conspiracy theory that the toggle is a false distraction and they’re actually keeping everything, and that none of the employees involved will ever whistleblow this fact.

Outside of Internet comment sections, I think most people assume these US-based companies are doing what they say.

For enterprise use there are services like AWS Bedrock which have strict isolation guarantees. There are some people who still believe those guarantees are a lie, but once someone has reached that point I don’t think they trust anything that isn’t running entirely within their house. People in that category are a very small minority, but a very vocal minority.

	▲	lynndotpy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The impression I have (from interacting with people IRL using OpenAI and Anthropics offerings, and how they feel about the risks involved) is just the opposite. But we probably just have different life experiences.