logoalt Hacker News

usef-today at 6:55 AM3 repliesview on HN

That's very defeatist. Do you have any concrete reason to think the major providers are lying to every one of their business/API customers about not training or storing the data? The business loss of trust would outweigh any benefits of the data.

(And if they freely lie about such things, I don't know why they would bother taking the PR hit when they announced fable had temporary data retention for their abuse prevention)


Replies

unionpivotoday at 9:11 AM

Because they know that in the end there will only be a few winners, and if you are one of them, you will settle even if its for billions, and if not it doesn't matter because you will be bankrupt anyway.

And besides various companies have been caught ripping torrents and other copyright data, what makes you so sure that same companies wont rip your data too.

Thats on top of 50 to a 100 years of companies straight up breaking the law to get ahead. Various ubers and food delivery app being the latest example.

I dont trust a lot of companies that i have to work with in some form or other anyway, with Oracle being on top of my personal shit list, followed by Salesforce and Broadcom.

And I dont think most of the AI companies are more ethical than any of the above.

nolist_policytoday at 7:27 AM

AI labs are limited by the available training data, the best way to improve model performance is more and better training data.

The AI labs and the downstream companies that sell training data to them vacuum up everything they can.

Illegal residential proxies (botnets) that once have been used by hackers and scammers are now used to vacuum up the Internet.

They are now vacuuming up antique books that are practically useless.[1]

In face of this is is unthinkable to me that they are not training on API data.

> The business loss of trust would outweigh any benefits of the data.

The loss of trust is already here.

I know of one German company that uses AI only in areas where they have to compete with (foreign) startups. For their core business and everything else they are waiting for an on-prem solution. Apparently Microsoft can provide on-prem GPT-5.

[1] https://lesekauz.de/forum/thread/1999-sammelbestellungen-von...

KronisLVtoday at 1:13 PM

> That's very defeatist. Do you have any concrete reason to think the major providers are lying to every one of their business/API customers about not training or storing the data? The business loss of trust would outweigh any benefits of the data.

I mean, if those providers cared about infosec enough, stuff like this probably wouldn't happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48877371

At the same time if I was one of those large orgs and was running out of training data and falling behind the competitors, I'd probably have to stretch every definition under the sun, like what counts as "metadata". From a zero sum game perspective, it doesn't make that much sense for them NOT to train on your data if the consequences upon (non-guaranteed) discovery seem largely inconsequential when everyone just wants the best model regardless.