mccThere *has* been a lot of talk about the problems with so-called "AI" but one I don't feel gets enough attention is that "AI" products are surveillance products. "AI" is inevitably run in a cloud service, and in order for the AI to know what to generate some amount of the context within your application— usually it's not clear to the user what context, or how much— has to get sent to the cloud. The more of my local app state that gets transmitted over the Internet, the less comfortable I am.
So consider the "Copilot button". I cannot imagine a way this could get implemented that doesn't come down to "there's a trap button on your keyboard that every time you press it, some nonobvious chunk of local/personal information gets sent over the Internet and bounces between multiple corporations". The privacy policy will claim the information is not "retained", but the moment this centralized data pipe exists every intelligence service on earth will have a high incentive to get a tap on it.
Henri@mcc I'm sure it will already preprocess your data before you press the button.
But otherwise, local LLMs are also a thing, but not reaching to the same level as GPT-4 and also they take a lot of resources.
@slyecho If this is the case, it just becomes a matter of reversing the "preprocessing".
In the case of Microsoft, I think we can assume that the "AI" will never be local and as much as possible will occur on the server side, because Microsoft's entire motivation in pushing "AI" this way is to generate business for Azure.
@mcc I really doubt it, because it would be cheaper to do as much as possible on the customer's machine and using their electricity. Business AI is something different.
Zorro Notorious MEB 😡@slyecho @mcc The really scary part of all of this to me is that if Microsoft is announcing this now, it means all of the contracts have been signed, funds have been committed and software has been deployed. It's too late for us puny users to say "Hell, NO!" 😡
Maybe the EU can push back like they did when Microsoft embedded Internet Exploiter in Win95, but in the end, even that would surprise me.
The Doctor@AlgoCompSynth @slyecho @mcc The most effective way to do business is never give anything or anyone a chance to stop you. Ever.