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| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
didntknowyou wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
kinda depressing the race general intelligence is motivated by the
potential to profit from ad sales.
phtrivier wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
Is anthropic using ads ? Is mistral using ads ? Is déepseek using ads
?
Google, meta, and amazon, sure, of course.
It's interesting that the "every company" part is only open ai...
They're now part of the "bad guys spying on you to display ads." At
least it's a viable business model, maybe they can recoup capex and
yearly losses in a couple decades instead of a couple centuries.
vivzkestrel wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
- new startup idea: sound proof boxes for all your electronic devices
- put them inside the soundproof box and they cannot hear anything
outside
- the box even shows the amount of time for which the device has not
been able to snoop on you daily
rrr_oh_man wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
Iâm more and more drawn to the Enemy of the State solution.
schaefer wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
I already have a refrigerator. Thanks. :)
stego-tech wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
Contextual irony aside, this is a big reason why the proposal of
leveraging AI agents for workflow processing in lieu of using them to
develop fixed software to perform the same functions has always struck
me as weird, and of late come across as completely nonsensical.
If you're paying someone else to run the inference for these models, or
even to build these models, then you're ultimately relying on their
specific preferences for which tools, brands, products, companies, and
integrations they prefer, not necessarily what you need or want. If
and when they deprecate the model your agentic workflow is built on,
you now have to rebuild and re-validate it on whatever the new model
is. Even if you go out of your way to run things entirely locally with
expensive inference kit and a full security harness to keep things in
check, you could spend a lot less just having it vomit up some slopcode
that one of your human specialists can validate and massage into
perpetual functionality before walling it off on a VM or container
somewhere for the next twenty years.
The more you're outsourcing workflows wholesale to these bots, the more
you're making yourself vulnerable to the business objectives of whoever
hosts and builds those bots. If you're just using it as a slop machine
to get you the software you want and that IT can support indefinitely,
then you're going to be much better off in the long run.
rrr_oh_man wrote 19 hours 23 min ago:
Itâs the siren song of the lazy
stego-tech wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
It's the siren song of the myopically lazy. It's laziness today in
exchange for harder work tomorrow, with the wager that tomorrow's
harder work will be even lazier thanks to advances in technology.
Whereas I'd self-describe as "strategically lazy". It's building
iterable code and repeatable processes today, so I can be lazy far
into the future. It's engineering solutions today that are easier
to support with lazier efforts tomorrow, regardless of whether
things improve or get worse.
Building processes around agents predicated on a specific model is
myopically lazy, because you'll be rebuilding and debugging that
entire setup next year when your chosen agent is deprecated or
retired. Those of us building documented code with agents today,
will have an easier time debugging it in the future because the
hard work is already done.
Incidentally, we'll also have gainful employment tomorrow by
un-fucking agent-based workflows that didn't translate into
software when tokens were cheap and subsidized by VCs for market
capture purposes.
13pixels wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
The explicit ads angle is only half the story. Even without paid
placements, these models already have implicit recommendations baked
in.
We ran queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity asking for
product recommendations in ~30 B2B categories. The overlap between what
each model recommends is surprisingly low -- around 40% agreement on
the top 5 picks for any given category. And the correlation with Google
search rankings? About 0.08.
So we already have a world where which CRM or analytics tool gets
recommended depends on which model someone happens to ask, and nobody
-- not the models, not the brands, not the users -- has any
transparency into why. That's arguably more dangerous than explicit
ads, because at least with ads you know you're being sold to.
ACCount37 wrote 20 hours 27 min ago:
What you're saying is "different LLMs recommend different things".
Replace "LLMs" with "random schmucks online" and what changes
exactly?
jayd16 wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
No one is arguing to replace everything with random schmucks.
ACCount37 wrote 19 hours 9 min ago:
Why would one argue for the status quo?
ardeaver wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps I'm not totally clear on how this particular device works, but
it doesn't seem like it has no ability to connect to the Internet.
Honestly, I'd say privacy is just as much about economics as it is
technical architecture. If you've taken outside funding from
institutional venture capitalists, it's only a matter of time before
you're asked to make even more moneyâ¢, and you may issue a quiet,
boring change to your terms and conditions that you hope no one will
read... Suddenly, you're removing mentions of your company's old "Don't
Be Evil" slogan.
emsign wrote 1 day ago:
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. This
is the age of enlightenment in reverse, the age of immaturity.
tempodox wrote 1 day ago:
This is just an ad for maximally intrusive âAIâ. Weâre quite
inured by now to all the dystopian nightmares, so this barely even
registers.
5o1ecist wrote 1 day ago:
> Theyâre building a pocket-sized, screenless device with built-in
cameras and microphones â âcontextually aware,â designed to
replace your phone.
"Contextually aware" means "complete surveillance".
Too many people speak of ads, not enough people speak about the
normalization of the global surveillance machine, with Big Brother
waiting around the corner.
Instead, MY FELLOW HUMANS are, or will be, programmed to accept and
want their own little "Big Brother's little brother" in their pocket,
because it's usefull and or makes them feel safe and happy.
alansaber wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
Already here. Even without flexible but dodgy LLM automation,
entities like marketing companies have had access to extreme amounts
of user data for a long time.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> not enough people speak about the normalization of the global
surveillance machine, with Big Brother waiting around the corner
Everyone online is constantly talking about it. The truth is for most
people it's fine.
Some folks are upset by it. But we by and large tend to just solve
the problem at the smallest possible scale and then mollify
ourselbves with whining. (I don't have social media. I don't have
cameras in or around my home. I've worked on privacy legislation, but
honestly nobody called their representatives and so nothing much
happened. I no longer really bring up privacy issues when I speak to
my electeds because I haven't seen evidence that nihilism has
passed.)
5o1ecist wrote 1 day ago:
There are many things wrong with your post and I'm not convinced
that there is a point in attempting explaining it to you, MY FELLOW
HUMAN.
I'll let you decide.
Thank you.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> I'm not convinced that there is a point in attempting
explaining it
That encapsulates my point.
Iâve worked on various pieces of legislation. All privately. A
few made it into state and federal law. Broadly speaking, the
ones that make it are the ones for which you canât get their
supporters to stop calling in on.
Privacy issues are notoriously shit at getting people to call
their electeds on. The exception is when you can find traction
outside tech, or if the target is directly a tech company.
tokioyoyo wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
Pretty much this. Nobody really actually cares. People will
cite 1984 twenty million times, but since they're very
disconnected from 3rd order effects of cross-company data
brokerage, it doesn't really matter. I used to care about it
before as well, but life became much easier once I took the
"normie stand" on some of the issues.
BrenBarn wrote 1 day ago:
We're getting closer to a world where every company is an ad company,
period. It seems like there are more and more ads touting a dwindling
number of actual products.
alfiedotwtf wrote 1 day ago:
Iâve moved to Opencode, and I donât see myself ever leaving it (if
there were no alternatives ie AI glasses etc)
s09dfhks wrote 20 hours 31 min ago:
I've been using it a bit as well. I'm trying to figure out how
they're making money off free tier users though. Any ideas?
alfiedotwtf wrote 10 hours 21 min ago:
I havenât even thought about that tbh. Iâm guessing if they
have enough of an injection, theyâll âfigure it out laterâ
ghywertelling wrote 1 day ago:
One point I see less discussed, not related to the post, is "We never
trained people to pay for software. If there existed proper global
payment mechanism for software companies, the whole trajectory would
look different. People are ok to pay 5$ for a coffee but not for
software which makes their lives easier."
bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
The always-on future is absolutely not inevitable but I get that people
have a lot of money riding on convincing people it is
alansaber wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
It's a very profitable idea admittedly
tolerance wrote 1 day ago:
The product thatâs being implicitly advertised here is supposed to
ship at the end of this year and there doesnât even appear to be a
real photo of the thing and if thatâs an indicator of the quality of
the product then I must assume that it is poor and the people
responsible also apparently do not have the money to hire a capable web
designer and Iâm sorry if this is harsh or unnecessary but I never
thought I would miss the generic Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever
bougie framework other companies use because boy the layout here does
not elicit great expectations for their product either and Iâm
worried that if it ever does ship that nefarious parties will intercept
all the private communications of its unfortunate owners and in an
ironic sort of way their devices will become the first sort of reverse
ad agent that does not transmit advertisements but receives
advertisements in the form of the raw interests of their clients fed to
said nefarious parties and then laundered through more traditional
channels.
A man-in-the-middle-of-the-middle-man.
ajuhasz wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
The first version will use small batch production techniques like 3D
printing and small volume PCB manufacturing. On the photos, we
thought it to be more appropriate to show a sketch vs a pretty AI
generated photo that is true to anything yet but presents well.
We have some details here on how weâre doing the prototyping with
some photos of the current prototype:
HTML [1]: https://juno-labs.com/blogs/how-we-validate-our-custom-ai-ha...
tolerance wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
Well. Color me convinced a bit. I took a little time to compare
where your at now to where Ring began with Doorbot. Itâs not
improbable that this can take off.
Iâm not a product guy. Or a tech guy for that matter. Do you have
any preparations in mind for Appleâs progress with AI (viz. their
partnership with Google)? I donât even know if the actual
implementation would satisfy your vision with regard to everything
staying local though.
Starting with an iPad for prototyping made me wonder why this
didnât begin as just an app. Or why not just ship the speaker +
the app as a product.
You donât have sketches? Like ballpoint pen on dot grid paper?
This is me trying to nudge you away from the impression I get that
the website is largely AI-scented.
After making my initial remarks (a purposely absurd one that I was
actually surprised got upvoted at all), I checked your resume and
felt a disconnect between your qualifications and the legitimate
doubt I described in my comment.
To be honest my impression was mostly led by the contents of the
website itself, speculation about the quality/reliability of the
actual product followed.
I donât want to criticize you and your decisions in that
direction but if this ambition is legitimate it deserves better
presentation.
Do you have any human beings involved in communicating your vision?
tempodox wrote 1 day ago:
In addition to being vaporware, itâs presumably vibecoded slop, so:
vaporslop.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> is supposed to ship at the end of this year and there doesnât
even appear to be a real photo
Given they're "still finalizing the design and materials" and are not
based in China, I think it's a safe bet that the first run will
either be delayed or be an alpha.
aaron465 wrote 1 day ago:
Advertising and AI colliding is gonna be horrible, but their post is
also just an ad itself
jeandejean wrote 1 day ago:
> The always-on future is inevitable
Well the consumers will decide. Some people will find it very useful,
but some others will not necessarily like this... Considering how many
times I heard people yelling "OK GOOGLE" for "the gate" to open, I'm
not sure a continuous flow of heavily contextualized human conversation
will necessarily be easier to decipher?
I know guys, AI is magic and will solve everything, but I wouldn't be
surprised if it ordered me eggs and butter when I mentioned out loud I
was out of it but actually happy about this because I was just about to
go on vacations. My surprise when I'm back: melted butter and rotten
eggs at my door...
Sparkyte wrote 1 day ago:
I mean google was always an ad company and search engine. SOOOO hasn't
changed much.
alansaber wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
Google can still (albeit with enormous difficulty) die as a company.
If LLM search eclipses SEO and Gemini doesn't work out they're in
trouble.
witnessme wrote 1 day ago:
The concern is real but the local solution is not ready. The author
does not seem to think about that from the perspective of an "average
consumer". I have been running my personal AI assistant on a
consumer-grade computer, for almost an year now. It can do only one in
thousand of the tasks that cloud models can do and that too at a much
slow pace. Local ai assistant on consumer grade hardware is at least a
few year away, and "always-on" is much further than that IMO.
0xbadcafebee wrote 1 day ago:
> The always-on future is inevitable
Not if you use open source. Not if you pay for services contractually
will not mine your data. Not if you support start-ups that commit to
privacy and the banning of ads.
I said on another thread recently that we need to kill Android, that we
need a new Mobile Linux that gives us total control over what our
devices do, our software does. Not controlled by a corporation. Not
with some bizarre "store" that floods us with millions of
malware-ridden apps, yet bans perfectly valid ones. We have to take
control of our own destiny, not keep handing it over to someone else
for convenience's sake. And it doesn't end at mobile. We need to find,
and support, the companies that are actually ethical. And we need to
stop using services that are conveniently free.
Vote with your dollars.
ponector wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
>> that gives us total control over what our devices do
Like rooted Android phone, which is useless for regular folks because
many critical apps doesn't work (like banking).
Gander5739 wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
I have a rooted Android phone and my banking app works fine, with
relatively little effort to get it working.
Though rooting is quite niche, so it's easy enough for banks to
disallow it completely when accessing their apps. If root access
were as common on mobile devices as on desktop I doubt there would
be any problems at all.
bigyabai wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
We have mobile Linux. It's only supported on less than a dozen
handsets and runs like shit, but we have it already.
The reason nobody uses mobile Linux is that it has to compete with
AOSP-derived OSes like LineageOS and GrapheneOS, which don't suck or
run like shit. This is what it looks like when people vote with their
dollars, people want the status-quo we have (despite the horrible
economic damages).
michelsedgh wrote 1 day ago:
Does anyone know how this device will filter out other voices like TV
talking and stuff like that?
dasil003 wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I don't understand the appeal of the
always-on AI assistant at all. Even leaving privacy/security issues
aside, and even if it gets super smart and capable, it feels like it
would have a distancing effect from my own life, and undermine my own
agency in shaping it.
I'm not against AI in general, and some assistant-like functionality
that functions on demand to search my digital footprint and handle
necessary but annoying administrative tasks seems useful. But it feels
like at some point it becomes a solution looking for a problem, and to
squeeze out the last ounce of context-aware automation and efficiency
you would have to outsource parts of your core mental model and
situational awareness of your life. Imagine being over-scheduled like
an executive who's assistant manages their calendar, but it's not a
human it's a computer, and instead of it being for the purpose of
maximizing the leverage of your attention as a captain of industry,
it's just to maintain velocity on a personal rat race of your own
making with no especially wide impact, even on your own psyche.
rglover wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
I think it has very little to do with the assistant factor and more
to do with the loneliness factor (at least in the West, people are
getting lonelier, not less). In other words: sell it to them as a
friendly companion/assistant, playing on emotions, while creating a
sea of surveillance drones you can license back to the powers that be
at a premium.
It's a hell of a mousetrap.
Starts playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
alansaber wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
May I refer you to WALL-E. The contention between hard vs convenient
in our daily lives always seems to slowly edge towards convenient. If
not in this generation, the next gen will be more willing to offload
more.
larusso wrote 1 day ago:
Totally agree. Sounds some envision want some level of Downton Abbey
without the humans as service personal. A footman / maid in every
room or corner to handle your requests at any given moment.
kaffekaka wrote 1 day ago:
Agree.
No matter how useful AI is and will become - I use AI daily, it is an
amazing technology - so much of the discourse is indeed a solution
looking for a problem. I have colleagues suggesting on exactly
everything "can we put an MCP in it" and they don't even know what
the point of MCP is!
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
It's the rat race. I gotta get my cheese, and fuck you, because you
getting cheese means I go hungry. The kindergarden lesson on sharing
got replaced by a lesson on intellectual property. Copyright,
trademark, patents, and you.
Or we could opt out, and help everyone get ahead, on the rising tide
lifts all boats theory, but from what I've seen, the trickle of
trickle down economics is urine.
emsign wrote 1 day ago:
First it's ads, then it's political agenda. We've seen this
inconspicuous transition happen with social media and it will happen
even more inconspicuously with LLMs.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
> The most helpful AI will also be the most intimate technology ever
built. It will hear everything. See everything
Big Brother is watching you. Who knew it would be AI ...
The author is quite right. It will be an advertisement scam. I wonder
whether people will accept that though. Anyone remembers ublock origin?
Google killed it on chrome. People are not going to forget that. (It
still works fine on Firefox but Google bribed Firefox into submission;
all that Google ad money made Firefox weak.)
Recently I had to use google search again. I was baffled at how useless
it became - not just from the raw results but the whole UI - first few
entries are links to useless youtube videos (also owned by Google). I
don't have time to watch a video; I want the text info and extract it
quickly. Using AI "summaries" is also useless - Google is just trying
to waste my time compared to the "good old days". After those initial
videos to youtube, I get about 6 results, three of which are to some
companies writing articles so people visit their boring website. Then I
get "other people searched for candy" and other useless links. I never
understood why I would care what OTHER people search for when I want to
search for something. Is this now group-search? Group-think 1984? And
then after that, I get some more videos at youtube.
Google is clearly building a watered-down private variant of the web.
Same problem with AMP pages. Google is annoying us - and has become a
huge problem. (I am writing this on thorium right now, which is also
chrome-based; Firefox does not allow me to play videos with audio as I
don't have or use pulseaudio whereas the chrome-based browser does not
care and my audio works fine - that shows you the level of incompetency
at Mozilla. They don't WANT to compete against Google anymore. And did
not want since decades. Ladybird unfortunately also is not going to
change anything; after I critisized one of their decisions, they banned
me. Well, that's a great way to try to build up an alternative when you
deal with criticism via censorship - all before leaving alpha or beta
already. Now imagine the amount of censorship you will get once
millions of people WERE to use it ... something is fundamentally wrong
with the whole modern web, and corporations have a lot to do with this;
to a lesser extent also people but of course not all of them)
FeteCommuniste wrote 1 day ago:
It would be really great if Google had a setting that allowed you to
exclude certain domains from all searches by default. Like you, a
YouTube video (or a Facebook page, or an Instagram or Twitter post)
is basically never what I am looking for.
rrr_oh_man wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
`-site:youtube.com`?
econ wrote 1 day ago:
Just when you've asked if there are eggs the doorbell rings, the
neighbor stands there in disbelief, it told me to bring you eggs? Give
him the half bottle vodka, it's going to expire soon and his son will
make a surprise visit tonight. An argument arises and it participates
by encouraging both parties with extra talking points.
But this was only the beginning, after gathering a few TB worth of
micro expressions it starts to complete sentences so successfully the
conversation gradually dies out.
After a few days of silence... Narrator mode activated....
halper wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
Vodka that expires must be the epitome of enshittification!
walterbell wrote 1 day ago:
> after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it starts to
complete sentences
Apple bought those for $2B.. coming to Siri.
fwipsy wrote 1 day ago:
I'm invested in this scenario now, you should write a short story.
HWR_14 wrote 1 day ago:
I really dislike the preorder page. The fact that it's a deposit is in
a different color that fades into the background, and it refers to it
as a "price" multiple times. I don't know if it was intentionally
deceptive, but it made me dislike this company.
sciencesama wrote 1 day ago:
We need an ai adblocker !!
freakynit wrote 1 day ago:
I mean why is it so difficult for such companies to understand the core
thing: irrespective of whether the data related to our daily lives gets
processed on their servers or ours, we DON'T want it stored beyond a
few minutes at max.
Even if these folks are giving away this device for 100% free, I'll
still not keep it inside my house.
soared wrote 1 day ago:
Because storing, analyzing, and selling access to your data is
massively profitable and they donât care what the (not even vocal)
privacy focused minority wants.
lifestyleguru wrote 1 day ago:
How long web search had been objective, nice, and helpful - 10 years?
Now things are happening faster so there is max 5 years in total of AI
prompt pretending that they want to help.
luxuryballs wrote 1 day ago:
I guess it goes to show that real value is in the broader market to a
certain extent, if they canât just sell people the power they and up
just earning a commission for helping someone else sell a product.
nfgrep wrote 1 day ago:
> There needs to be a business model based on selling the hardware and
software, not the data the hardware collects. An architecture where the
company that makes the device literally cannot access the data it
processes, because there is no connection to access it through.
Genuine Q: Is this business model still feasible? Its hard to imagine
anyone other than apple sustaining a business off of hardware; they
have the power to spit out full hardware refreshes every year. How do
you keep a team of devs alive on the seemingly one-and-done cash influx
of first-time-buyers?
HenryOsborn wrote 1 day ago:
This was the inevitable endpoint of the current AI unit economics. When
inference costs are this high and open-source models are compressing
SaaS margins to zero, companies can't survive on standard subscription
models. They have to subsidize the compute by monetizing the user's
context window. The real liability isn't just ads; it's what happens
when autonomous agents start making financial decisions influenced by
sponsored retrieval data.
danny_codes wrote 1 day ago:
Thing is there are OSS models that are near as good. So I donât see
why youâd stay for ad flop when you can just point openrouter one
to the left.
Animats wrote 1 day ago:
> Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
Apple? [1]
HTML [1]: https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
kibwen wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, Apple is an ad company. Their annual ad revenue is in the
billions, and climbing every year.
bitpush wrote 1 day ago:
Its always fascinating that HN crowd seems to be blind to Apple's
very obvious transgressions.
Even the article makes the mistake. They paint every company with a
broad brush ("all AI companies are ad companies") but for Apple
they are more sympathetic "We can quibble about Apple".
Apple's reality distort field is so strong. People still think they
are not in ad business. People still think they stand up to
government, and folks chose to ignore hard evidence (Apple operates
in China on CCP's pleasure. Apple presents a gold plaque to
President Trump to curry favors and removes ICEBlock apps ..)
There's no pushback, there's no spine.
Every company is disgusting. Apple is hypocritical and disgusting.
thundergolfer wrote 1 day ago:
I agree with the core premise that the big AI companies are
fundamentally driven towards advertising revenue and other antagonistic
but profit-generating functionality.
Also agree with paxys that the social implications here are deep and
troubling. Having ambient AI in a home, even if it's caged to the home,
has tricky privacy problems.
I really like the explorations of this space done in Black Mirror's The
Entire History of You[1] and Ted Chiang's The Truth of Fact short
story[2].
My bet is that the home and other private spaces almost completely
yield to computer surveillance, despite the obvious problems. We've
already seen this happen with social media and home surveillance
cameras.
Just as in Chiang's story spaces were 'invaded' by writing, AI will
fill the world and those opting out will occupy the same marginal
positions as those occupied by dumb phone users and people without home
cameras or televisions.
Interesting times ahead.
1. [1] 2.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_...
ripped_britches wrote 1 day ago:
I think local inference is great for many things - but this stance
seems to conflate that you canât have privacy with server side
inference, and you canât have nefariousness with client side
inference. A device that does 100% client side inference can still
phone home unless itâs disconnected from internet. Most people will
want internet-connected agents right? And server side inference can be
private if engineered correctly (strong zero retention guarantees,
maybe even homomorphic encryption)
zmmmmm wrote 1 day ago:
It's interesting to me that there seems to be an implicit line being
drawn around what's acceptable and what's not between video and audio.
If there's a camera in an AI device (like Meta Ray Ban glasses) then
there's a light when it's on, and they are going out of their way to
engineer it to be tamper resistant.
But audio - this seems to be on the other side of the line. Passively
listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need
active consent, flashing lights or other privacy preserving measures.
And it's true, it's fundamentally different, because I have to make a
proactive choice to speak, but I can't avoid being visible. So you can
construct a logical argument for it.
I'm curious how this will really go down as these become pervasively
available. Microphones are pretty easy to embed almost invisibly into
wearables. A lot of them already have them. They don't use a lot of
power, it won't be too hard to just have them always on. If we settle
on this as the line, what's it going to mean that everything you say,
everywhere will be presumed recorded? Is that OK?
BoxFour wrote 1 day ago:
> Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something
that doesn't need active consent
Thatâs not accurate. There are plenty of states that require
everyone involved to consent to a recording of a private
conversation. California, for example.
Voice assistants today skirt around that because of the wake word,
but always-on recording obviously negates that defense.
zmmmmm wrote 1 day ago:
Well, that's why I say "being treated"
I'm not aware of many bluetooth headphones that blink an obvious
light just because they are recording. You can get a pair of
sunglassses with a microphone and record with it and it does
nothing to alert anybody.
Whether it's actually legal or not, as you say, varies - but it's
clear where device manufactures think the line lies in terms of
what tech they implement.
paxys wrote 1 day ago:
AI "recording" software has never been tested in court, so no one
can say what the legality is. If we are having a conversation (in a
two party consent state) and a secret AI in my pocket generates a
text transcript of it in real time without storing the audio, is
that illegal? What about if it just generates a summary? What about
if it is just a list of TODOs that came out of the conversation?
pclmulqdq wrote 1 day ago:
Speech-to-text has gone through courts before. It's not a new
technology. You're out of luck on sneaking the use of
speech-to-text in 2-party consent states.
1over137 wrote 1 day ago:
Of course it's new! Now it's "AI"! /s
paxys wrote 1 day ago:
This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company (
[1] ) is pushing â an always on, always listening AI device that
inserts itself into your and your familyâs private lives.
âOh but they only run on local hardwareâ¦â
Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be
recorded and analyzed by an AI.
Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments
(including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later?
Have all your guests consented to this?
What happens when someone breaks in and steals the box?
What if the government wants to take a look at the data in there and
serves a warrant?
What if a large company comes knocking and makes an acquistion offer?
Will all the privacy guarantees still stand in face of the $$$ ?
HTML [1]: https://juno-labs.com/
peyton wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
Iâm 99% sure this article is AI generated. Regardless, people will
gravitate to the tool that solves their problems. If their problem is
finding a local plumber or a restaurant they like, advertising will
be involved.
tzs wrote 1 day ago:
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments
(including of underage family members) being saved for replaying
later?
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything there that said it saved
conversations. It sounds like it processes them as they happen and
then takes actions that it thinks will help you achieve whatever
goals of your it can infer from the conversation.
drdaeman wrote 1 day ago:
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments
(including of underage family members) being saved for replaying
later?
Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories?
Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with
one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as
great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and
age. If a machine can supplement that in the same way my glasses
supplement my vision, or my friend's hearing aid supplements his
hearing - that'd be nice. That's why we have technology in the first
place, to improve our lives, right?
But, as I said, there is an important condition. Today, what's in my
head stays in there, and is only directly available to me. The
machine-assisted memory aid must provide the same guarantees. If any
information leaves the device without my direct instruction - that's
a hard "no". If someone with physical access to the device can
extract the information without a lot of effort - that's also a hard
"no". If someone can too easily impersonate myself to the device and
improperly gain access - that's another "no". Maybe there are a few
more criteria, but I hope you got the overall idea.
If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot
violate others' privacy - no more than I can do myself. And then -
yeah - I want it, wish there'd be something like that.
beepbooptheory wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
Humbly offer this, a cautionary tale perhaps. [1]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious
HTML [2]: https://www.mathfiction.net/files/Mathfiction%20-%20Borges...
drdaeman wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
Iâm not sure I understand the morale of the story. Would you
share yours?
A crudest summary of my understanding is that itâs a tale of
some dude with eidetic memory who - as a consequence of it -
develops a conlang with a huge vocabulary but without abstract
concepts.
Itâs a stretch for sure, but all I could think of it, is that
itâs possibly a tale of how a person with an eidetic memory may
find the sheer volume of available information so overwhelming it
may even hurt their information processing, like the formation of
associative memories. Or something like that, I donât think I
know how it works.
If that, my idea of how machine-assisted memory is supposed to
work is opposite of that, it should provide limited but relevant
information, with a lot of classifications and references
further. Like an encyclopedia with extra fancy natural language
querying mechanism. Itâs whole point to give awareness about
anything user wants to know, faster and more comprehensively than
regular diaries, but focused on just what matters for an inquiry.
Fumes, in my understanding, wouldnât have an idea of a
âkeyâ but only âthat front door key on a silver keychainâ
or âsmaller mailbox key with a deep scratch on the right
sideâ. If Iâd be querying external memory through a natural
language interface, itâd be doing opposite of that, heavily
relying on abstract ideas as classifiers. Machine that cannot
connect âmailâ, âkeyâ and âlocationâ into a
meaningful query would be useless. Computer âAIâ assistant is
not an eidetic memory (at least until we start to consider BMI),
itâs only a personal encyclopedia at oneâs fingertips.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
Memories are usually private. People can make them public via a
blog.
AI feels more like an organized sniffing tool here.
> If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot
violate others' privacy
A product can most assuredly violate privacy. Just look how
Facebook gathered offline data to interconnect people to reallife
data points, without their consent - and without them knowing.
That's why I call it Spybook.
Ever since the USA became hostile to Canadians and Europeans this
has also become much easier to deal with anyway - no more data is
to be given to US companies.
drdaeman wrote 1 day ago:
> AI feels more like an organized sniffing tool here.
"AI" on its own is an almost meaningless word, because all it
tells is that there's something involving machine learning. This
alone doesn't have any implied privacy properties, the devil is
always in the untold details.
But, yeah, sure, given the current trends I don't think this
device will be privacy-respecting, not to say truly private.
> A product can most assuredly violate privacy.
That depends on the design and implementation.
encom wrote 1 day ago:
>That's why we have technology in the first place, to improve our
lives, right?
No, we have technology to show you more and more ads, sell you more
and more useless crap, and push your opinions on Important Matters
toward the state approved ones.
Of course indoor plumbing, farming, metallurgy and printing were
great hits, but technology has had a bit of a dry spell lately.
If "An always-on AI that listens to your household" doesn't make
you recoil in horror, you need to pause and rethink your life.
schrodinger wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
I don't think that ads _have_ to be evil.
When I look at Google, I see a company that is fully funded by
ads, but provides me a number of highly useful services that
haven't really degraded over 20 years. Yes, the number of search
results that are ads grew over the years, but by and large,
Google search and Gmail are tools that serve rather benevolently.
And if you're about to disagree with this ask yourself if you're
using Gmail, and why?
Then I look at Meta or X, and I see a cesspool of content that's
driven families apart and created massive societal divides.
It makes me think that Ads aren't the root of the problem, though
maybe a "necessary but not sufficient" component.
encom wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
Google is almost cartoonishly evil these days. I think that's
pretty much an established fact at this point.
I'm not using Gmail, and I don't understand why anyone would
voluntarily. It was the worst email client I'd ever used, until
I had to use Outlook at my new job.
The only Google products I use are YouTube, because that's
where the content is. And Android, because IOS is garbage and
Apple is only marginally less evil than Google.
schrodinger wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
Iâve recently begun using my personal domain as my primary
email address, with it forwarding to gmail so I can âget
outâ easily if I ever had a reason. That said, Iâve found
Gmailâs service great, their spam filtering highly
effective, (although I havenât surveyed the competition
lately so itâs possible their huge advantage no longer
exists) and their features pretty user-friendly (eg the
one-click unsubscribe as well as a page to view all your subs
in one place). I have never felt like they _abused_ the
immense amount of data they have about me nor used it for
âevilâ purposes; only to profit on relevant ads that are
at least clearly marked and unobtrusive. I donât like that
they have so much data on me, but Iâve felt like theyâve
been transparent about it, so itâs been on me for making a
decision eyes wide open. As opposed to Meta and the shady
shit theyâve been caught doing...
That said, Iâm open-minded and obviously thinking about
this given moving to my own domain.
Whatâs the evil behavior youâve experienced? Iâm down
to move off if Iâm oblivious to somethingâ¦
lukan wrote 1 day ago:
I really hope, that before I will get old and fragile, I will get
my smart robotic house, with an (local!) AI assistant always
listening to my wishes and then executing them.
I rather have the horror of being old and forgotten in a half
care like most old people are right now. AI and robots can bring
emporerment. And it is up to us, whether we let ad companies
serve them to us from the cloud, or local models running in the
basement.
drdaeman wrote 1 day ago:
> you need to pause and rethink your life.
If you can't think of an always-on AI that listens but doesn't
cause any horrors (even though its improbable to get to the
market in the world we live on), I urge you to exercise your
imagination. Surely, it's possible to think of an optimistic
scenario?
Even more so, if you think technology is here to unconditionally
screw us up no matter what. Honestly - when the world is so
gloomy, seek something nice, even if a fantasy.
encom wrote 1 day ago:
Not only is it improbable, it's a complete fantasy. It's not
going to happen. And personally, I'm of the opinion that having
AI be a constant presence in your life and relying on it to
assist you with every minor detail or major decision is
dystopian in the extreme, and that's not even factoring in the
inevitable Facebook-esque monetisation.
>when the world is so gloomy, seek something nice, even if a
fantasy
I don't need fantasy to do that. My something nice is being in
nature. Walking in the forest. Looking at and listening to the
ocean by a small campfire. An absence of stimulation. Letting
your mind wander. In peace, away from technology. Which is a
long winded way to say "touch grass", but - and I say this
sincerely without any snark - try actually doing it. You
realise the alleged gloom isn't even that bad. It's healing.
drdaeman wrote 1 day ago:
> I'm of the opinion that having AI be a constant presence in
your life and relying on it to assist you with every minor
detail or major decision is dystopian in the extreme
Could that be because you're putting some extra substance in
what you call an "AI"? Giving it some properties that it
doesn't necessarily have?
Because when I'm thinking about "AI" all I'm giving to it is
"a machine doing math at scale that allows us to have
meaningful relation with human concepts as expressed in a
natural language". I don't put anything extra in it, which
allows me to say "AI can do good things while avoiding bad
things". Surely, a machine can be made to crunch numbers and
put words together in a way that helps me rather than harms
me.
Oh, and if anything - I don't want "AI" to save me thinking.
It cannot do that for me anyway, in principle. I want it to
help me do things it machines finally start to do acceptably
well: remember and relate things together. This said, yea, I
guess I was generous with just a single requirement - now I
can see that a personal "AI" also needs its classifications
(interpretations) to match with the individual user's
expectations as close as possible at all times.
> It's not going to happen.
I can wholeheartedly agree as far as "it is extremely
unlikely to happen", but... to say "it is not going to
happen", after last five years of "that wasn't on my bingo
list"? How can you be so sure? How do we know there won't be
some more weird twists of history? Call me naive but I rather
want to imagine something nice would happen for a change. And
it's not beyond fathomable that something crashes and the
resulting waves, would possibly bring us towards a somewhat
better world.
Touching grass is important, and it helps a lot, but as soon
as you're back - nothing goes anywhere in the meanwhile. The
society with all the mess doesn't disappear while we stop
looking. So seeking an optimistic possibility is also
important, even if it may seem utterly unrealistic. I guess
one just have to have something to believe in?
duskdozer wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
I can imagine a lot of ways we could be using the new tech
advancements of the last decade or two in really great
ways, but unfortunately I've seen things go in very bad
directions almost every time, and I do not have faith that
this trend will stop in the future.
dbtc wrote 1 day ago:
This will not augment memory the way glasses do for sight, this
will replace memory the way a wheelchair replaces legs.
estimator7292 wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
So do you think disabled people deserve to participate in society
or not?
walt_grata wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
Yes but able bodied people shouldnt decide to use a wheelchair
until their legs attrophy and become useless.
drdaeman wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
I understand the rationale, but donât you see how this idea
contradicts autonomy of decisions for able-minded people?
Such good intentions tend to be a pavement on roads to bad
places.
Iâd rather suggest to inform about all the potential
benefits and drawbacks, but leave decisions with the
individual.
Especially given that itâs not something irreversibly
permanent.
walt_grata wrote 16 hours 47 min ago:
I'd agree but we're closer to getting forced into the chair
than making a decision that's right for us
throwaway5465 wrote 1 day ago:
They seem quite honest with who they are and how they do what they
do.
SkyPuncher wrote 1 day ago:
I agree. I also don't really have an ambient assistant problem. My
phone is always nearby and Siri picks up wake words well (or I just
hold the powerbutton).
My problem is Siri doesn't do any of this stuff well. I'd really love
to just get it out of the way so someone can build it better.
DontForgetMe wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
Honestly this has been my main issue with the tech privacy issue
for years.
I love smart gadgets. I really wanted to go all in and automate my
life, and the whole 'personal data' thing seemed like a really fair
trade off for what was promised.
Only, they took all the data and never really delivered the
convenience.
I spent about 10 years trying to figure out why WearOS needed to
collect all my data, all the time, even when I wasn't wearing a
watch, and yet when it crashed every few weeks, there was no way to
restore anything from a backup. Had to start again from scratch
every time (or ADB). What's the point in collecting all that data
when I couldn't usefully access any of it?
Same thing with Google home, more or less. I wasn't a big fan of
the terms and conditions, but hey, it's super convenient just being
able to announce 'ok Google I need to get out of bed soon' and have
it turn on the lights, play music etc.
Only, some mornings it wouldn't do that. Wouldn't even remember
that I'd set an alarm. And alarms kinda need to be reliable: if
they work 19 times out of 20, that's not actually good enough to
rely on. Dumb alarm clocks, or phones, you can be pretty sure the
alarm will go off
So, not much point using Google for morning routines and alarms.
So, not much point giving it full access to everything I say any
time.
I would give it all my data if it could reliably remember to play
preset alarms, or give a basic backup and restore option. Hell, I'd
probably give Google access to all my photos if the UI wasn't so
ugly.
I still don't really understand big techs reasoning here.
If data is the new gold and everyone was dying for more ways to
track odds us all and harvest our data - why not just build a
decent product?
If phone batteries lasted for days, people would spend more time on
their phones, isn't that what the tech companies want?
If competent people worked on making Gmail efficient, light, user
friendly, and not crawling with bugs more people would use it, and
more data.
It's like the oligarchs trying to take over the world will do
literally anything, anything to win, other than paying people to
develop decent, reliable products
ajuhasz wrote 1 day ago:
Some of the more magical moments weâve had with Juno is automatic
shopping list creation saying âoh no we are out of milk and
eggsâ out loud without having to remember to tell Siri becomes a
shopping list and event tracking around kids âDonât forget next
Thursday is early pickupâ. A nice freebie is moving the wake word
to the end. âWhatâs weather Juno today?â becomes much more
natural than a prefixed wake word.
com2kid wrote 1 day ago:
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments
(including of underage family members) being saved for replaying
later?
Typically not how these things work. Speech is processed using ASR
(automatic speech recognition), and then ran through a prompt that
checks for appropriate tools calls.
I've been meaning to basically make this myself but I've been too
lazy lately to bother.
I actually want a lot more functionality from a local only AI
machine, I believe the paradigm is absurdly powerful.
Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and
offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then
moving they browser window to a different tab.
Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being
able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be
forgotten about.
I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just
forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health
and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of
other people a device that just helps people remember important
things can be dramatically life changing.
dotancohen wrote 1 day ago:
> Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and
being able to just say them out loud and know important topics
won't be forgotten about.
I push a button on the phone and then say them. I've been doing
this for over twenty years. The problem is ever getting back to
those voice notes.
ramenbytes wrote 1 day ago:
> Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and
offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then
moving they browser window to a different tab.
> Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and
being able to just say them out loud and know important topics
won't be forgotten about.
> I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of
just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones
health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for
plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember
important things can be dramatically life changing.
Those don't sound like things that you need AI for.
jcgrillo wrote 1 day ago:
> > Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long
and offering to save off the comment your working on for later
and then moving they browser window to a different tab.
This would be its death sentence. Nuked from orbit:
sudo rm -rfv /
Or maybe if there's any slower, more painful way to kill an AI
then I'll do that instead. I can only promise the most horrible
demise I can possibly conjure is that clanker's certain end.
reilly3000 wrote 1 day ago:
It really is a prosthetic for minds that struggle to organize
themselves.
allovertheworld wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
Like a calendar
BoxFour wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs definitely a strange pitch, because the target audience (the
privacy-conscious crowd) is exactly the type who will immediately
spot all the issues you just mentioned. It's difficult to think of
any privacy-conscious individual who wouldn't want, at bare minimum,
a wake word (and more likely just wouldn't use anything like this
period).
The non privacy-conscious will just use Google/etc.
bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
I want a hardware switch for the microphone. If it can hear the
wake word it's already listening.
yndoendo wrote 1 day ago:
A good example of this is what one of my family member's partner
said. "Isn't creep that you just talked about something and now you
are seeing ads for it. Guess we just have to accept it."
My response was no I don't get any of that because I disable that
technology since it is always listening and can never be trusted.
There is no privacy in those services.
They did not like that response.
dotancohen wrote 1 day ago:
I used to be considered a weirdo and creep because I would answer
the question of why don't I have WhatsApp with the answer "I do
not accept their terms of service". Now people accept this
answer.
I don't know what changed, but the general public is starting to
figure out that that actually can disagree with large tech
companies.
ajuhasz wrote 1 day ago:
> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments
(including of underage family members) being saved for replaying
later?
One of our core architecture decisions was to use a streaming
speech-to-text model. At any given time about 80ms of actual audio is
in memory and about 5 minutes of transcribed audio (text) is in
memory (this is help the STT model know the context of the audio for
higher transcription accuracy).
Of these 5 minute transcripts, those that don't become memories are
forgotten. So only selected extracted memories are durably stored.
Currently we store the transcript with the memory (this was a request
from our prototype users to help them build confidence in the
transcription accuracy) but we'll continue to iterate based on
feedback if this is the correct decision.
zmmmmm wrote 1 day ago:
The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system
is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts
order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed
over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you
encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to
decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to
exist in the first place. It's a bit sad as the potential for what
technology can do to assist us grows that this actually may be the
limit on how much we can fully take advantage of it.
I do sometimes wish it would be seen as an enlightened policy to
legislate that personal private information held in technical devices
is legally treated the same as information held in your brain.
Especially for people for whom assistive technology is essential
(deaf, blind, etc). But everything we see says the wind is blowing
the opposite way.
Sharlin wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
> nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over
I'm being a bit flippant here, but thermite typically works fine.
DontForgetMe wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
Tricky to take data off the cloud, even with thermite
HWR_14 wrote 1 day ago:
> Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be
compelled to decrypt it,
In the US you it is not legal to be compelled to turn over a
password. It's a violation of your fifth amendment rights. In the
UK you can be jailed until you turn over the password.
lesuorac wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
Well, currently sure.
However, back when the constitution was amended the 5th amendment
also applied to your own papers. (How is using something you
wrote down not self-incrimination!?).
It only matters if one year in the future it is because all that
back data becomes immediately allowed.
HWR_14 wrote 15 hours 59 min ago:
Papers were covered under the 4th amendment. It's always been
the case that a warrant could let the government access your
journal.
lesuorac wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
> See United States v. Hubbell. In Boyd v. United States,[60]
the U.S. Supreme Court stated that "It is equivalent to a
compulsory production of papers to make the nonproduction of
them a confession of the allegations which it is pretended
they will prove". [1] This opinion hasn't lasted the test of
time but historically your own documents cannot be used
against use. Eventually the supreme court decided that since
corporations weren't people that their documents could used
against them and then later that it also people weren't
protected by their own documents.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the...
SpicyLemonZest wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
There are many jurisdictions in the US (not all!) where you can't
be compelled to turn over a password in a criminal case that's
specifically against yourself. But that's a narrow exception to
the general principle that a court can order you to give them
whatever information they'd like.
HWR_14 wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
It's a federal constitutional protection to not be compelled to
turn over your password. If you think a jurisdiction can compel
you, I would like references.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 10 hours 33 min ago:
The ACLU has a good overview ( [1] ). A number of state-level
supreme courts have ruled that the protection you're
describing exists, but others have ruled against it, and on
the federal level AFAIK only the DC Circuit has made a clear
ruling about it.
HTML [1]: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/police-...
eel wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
At Amazon, their travel trainings always recommended giving out
your laptop password if asked by law enforcement or immigration,
regardless of whether it was legal in the jurisdiction. Then you
were to report the incident as soon as possible afterwards, and
you'd have to change your password and possibly get your laptop
replaced.
That kind of policy makes sense for the employee's safety, but it
definitely had me thinking how they might approach other
tradeoffs. What if the Department of Justice wants you to hand
over some customer data that you can legally refuse, but you are
simultaneously negotiating a multi-billion dollar cloud hosting
deal with the same Department of Justice? What tradeoff does the
company make? Totally hypothetical situation, of course.
ratorx wrote 4 hours 38 min ago:
You can make it so employees donât have ambient access to
data, and require multi-party approval for all actions that
require user data. Giving away a user password should be
treated as a routine risk.
Iâm not saying thatâs how it actually works, and this
process doesnât have warts, but the ideal of individual
employees not having direct access is not novel.
DANmode wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
Totally.
rrr_oh_man wrote 23 hours 49 min ago:
Thereâs an interesting loophole for Face IDâ¦
estimator7292 wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
In the US, law enforcement is specifically allowed to compel
biometric scans to unlock personal devices.
schrodinger wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
FYI -- Because of this, Apple made a feature where if you
click the power button 5 times, your phone goes into "needs
the passcode to unlock" mode.
Whenever I'm approaching a border crossing (e.g. in an
airport), I'm sure to discreetly click power 5 times. You
also get haptic feedback on the 5th click so you can be sure
it worked even from within your pocket.
ajuhasz wrote 1 day ago:
Agreed, while we've tried to think through this and build in
protections we can't pretend that there is a magical perfect
solution. We do have strong conviction that doing this inside the
walls of your home is much safer than doing it within any companies
datacenter (I accept that some just don't want this to exist period
and we won't be able to appease them).
Some of our decisions in this direction:
- Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory
- Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on
the side of forgetting
(https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-th
at-listens-to-your-kitchen)
- Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on
top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM)
We're always open to criticism on how to improve our implementation
around this.
bossyTeacher wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
> - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory
I believe you should allow people to set how long the raw data
should be stored as well as dead man switches.
BoxFour wrote 1 day ago:
This strikes me as a pretty weak rationalization for "safe" always-on
assistants. Even if the model runs locally, thereâs still a serious
privacy issue: Unwitting victims of something recording everything they
said.
Friends at your house who value their privacy probably wonât feel
great knowing youâve potentially got a transcript of things they said
just because they were in the room. Sure, it's still better than also
sending everything up to OpenAI, but that doesnât make it harmless or
less creepy.
Unless youâve got super-reliable speaker diarization and can truly
ensure only opted-in voices are processed, itâs hard to see how any
always-listening setup ever sits well with people who value their
privacy.
luxuryballs wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder if the answer is that it is stored and processes in a way
that a human canât access or read, like somehow itâs encrypted
and unreadable but tokenized and can be processed, I donât know how
but it feels possible.
krupan wrote 1 day ago:
It wouldn't matter of you did all that because you could still ask
the AI, "what would my friend Bob think about this?" And the AI,
who heard Bob talking in his phone when he thought he was alone in
the other room, could tell you.
luxuryballs wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
Right but thatâs where the controls could be, it would just
pretend to not know about Bob due to consent controls etc, but of
course this would limit the usefulness.
ajuhasz wrote 1 day ago:
We give an overview of our the current memory architecture at [1]
This is something we call out under the "What we got wrong" section.
We're currently collecting an audio dataset that should help create a
speech-to-text (STT) model that incorporates speaker identification
and that tag will be weaved into the core of the memory architecture.
> The shared household memory pool creates privacy situations weâre
still working through. The current design has everyone in the family
shares the same memory corpus. Should a child be able to see a memory
their parents created? Our current answer is to deliberately tune the
memory extraction to be household-wide with no per-person scoping
because a kitchen device hears everyone equally. But âdeliberately
choseâ doesnât mean âsolved.â Weâre hoping our in-house STT
will allow us to do per-person memory tagging and then we can
experiment with scoping memories to certain people or groups of
people in the household.
HTML [1]: https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on...
com2kid wrote 1 day ago:
Heyas! Glad to see someone making this
I wrote a blog post about this exact product space a year ago. [1]
I hope y'all succeed! The potential use cases for locally hosted AI
dwarf what can be done with SaSS.
I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.
HTML [1]: https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actua...
ajuhasz wrote 1 day ago:
Yes! We see a lot of the same things that really should have been
solved by the first wave of assistants. Your _Around The House_
reads similar to a lot of our goals though we would love the
system to be much more pro-active than current assistants.
Feel free to reach out. Would love to swap notes and send you a
prototype.
> I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.
Oh man, we've had to really track our bill of materials (BOM) and
average selling price (ASP) estimates to make sure everything
stays feasible. Thankfully these models quantize well and the
size-to-intelligence frontier is moving out all the time.
doomslayer999 wrote 1 day ago:
Who would buy OpenAI's spy device? I think a lot of public discourse
and backlash about the greedy, anticompetitive, and exploitative
practices of the silicon valley elite have gone mainstream and will
hopefully course correct the industry in time.
alansaber wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
Loads of people? The Ari Alexa was tremendously successful as a
consumer product no? It's the same premise but "better"
notatoad wrote 1 day ago:
i'm continually surprised by how many people will buy and wear meta's
AI spy sunglasses.
if there's a market for a face camera that sends everything you see
to meta, there's probably a market for whatever device openAI
launches.
janice1999 wrote 1 day ago:
> ...exploitative practices of the silicon valley elite have gone
mainstream and will hopefully course correct the industry in time.
I have little hope that is true. Don't expect privacy laws and
boycott campaigns. That very same elite control the law via bribes to
US politicians (and indirectly the laws of other counties via those
politicians threats, see the ongoing watering down of EU laws). They
also directly control public discourse via ownership of the media and
mainstream communication platforms. What backlash can they really
suffer?
NickJLange wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't a technology issue. Regulation is the only sane way to
address the issue.
For once,we (as the technologists) have a free translator to laymen
speak via the frontier LLMs, which can be an opportunity to educate the
masses as to the exact world on the horizon.
knallfrosch wrote 1 day ago:
You could start by not buying an always-on AI device. Just saying.
(The article is an AI ad.)
Nevermark wrote 1 day ago:
> This isn't a technology issue. Regulation is the only sane way to
address the issue.
It is actually both a technology and regulation/law issue.
What can be solved with the former should be. What is left, solved
with the latter. With the best cases where both
consistently/redundantly uphold our rights.
I want legal privacy protections, consistent with privacy preserving
technology. Inconsistencies create technical and legal openings for
nefarious or irresponsible powers.
kleiba wrote 1 day ago:
Always on is incompatible with data protection rights, such as the GDPR
in Europe.
ajuhasz wrote 1 day ago:
With cloud based inference we agree, this being just one more benefit
of doing everything with "edge" inference (on device inside the home)
as we do with Juno.
popalchemist wrote 1 day ago:
Pretty sure a) it's not a matter of whether you agree and b) GDPR
still considers always-on listening to be something the affected
user has to actively consent to. Since someone in a household may
not realize that another person's device is "always on" and may
even lack the ability to consent - such as a child - you are
probably going to find that it is patently illegal according to
both the letter and the spirit of the law.
Is your argument that these affected parties are not users and that
the GDPR does not require their consent?
Don't take this as hostility. I am 100% for local inference. But
that is the way I understand the law, and I do think it benefits us
to hold companies to a high standard. Because even such a device
could theoretically be used against a person, or could have other
unintended consequences.
sxp wrote 1 day ago:
The article is forgetting about Anthropic which currently has the best
agentic programmer and was the backbone for the recent OpenClaw
assistants.
gpm wrote 1 day ago:
Also Mistral, which is definitely building AI assistants even if they
aren't quite as successful so far.
ajuhasz wrote 1 day ago:
True, we focused on hardware embodied AI assistants (smart speakers,
smart glasses, etc) as those are the ones we believe will soon start
leaving wake words behind and moving towards an always-on interaction
design. The privacy implications of an always-listening smart speaker
are magnitudes higher than OpenClaw that you intentionally interact
with.
popalchemist wrote 1 day ago:
Both are pandoras box. Open Claw has access to your credit cards,
social media accounts, etc by default (i.e. if you have them saved
in your browser on the account that Open Claw runs on, which most
people do.)
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote 1 day ago:
This. Kids already have tons of those gadgets on. Previously, I
only really had to worry about a cell phone so even if someone was
visiting, it was a simple case of plop all electronics here, but
now with glasses I am not even sure how to reasonably approach this
short of not allowing it period. Eh, brave new world.
rimbo789 wrote 1 day ago:
Ads in AI should be banned right now. We need to learn from mistakes of
the internet (crypto, facebook) and aggressively regulate early and
often before this gets too institutionalized to remove.
doomslayer999 wrote 1 day ago:
Boomers in government would be clueless on how to properly regulate
and create correct incentives. Hell, that is still a bold ask for
tech and economist geniuses with the best of intentions.
irishcoffee wrote 1 day ago:
Would that be the same cohort of boomers jamming LLMs up our
collective asses? So they donât understand how to regulate a
technology they donât understand, but fucking by golly youâre
going to be left behind if you donât use it?
This is like a shitty Disney movie.
doomslayer999 wrote 1 day ago:
It's mostly SV grifters who shoved LLMs up our asses. They then
get in cahoots with boomers in the government to create policies
and "investment schemes" that inflate their stock in a ponzi-like
fashion and regulate competition.
Why do you think Trump has some no-name crypto firm, or why Thiel
has Vance as his whipping boy, and Elon spend a fortune trying to
get Trump to win? This is a multiparty thing, as most politicians
are heavily bought and paid for.
nancyminusone wrote 1 day ago:
They did learn. That's why they are adding ads.
kalterdev wrote 1 day ago:
Ads (at least in the classical pre-AI sense) are by orders of
magnitude better than preventive laws
Marsymars wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably argue that Alaska would be
orders of magnitude better off if they reversed the implementation
of their billboard-banning ballot measure and put up billboards
everywhere.
rimbo789 wrote 1 day ago:
I trust corporations far far far less than government or lawmakers
(who I also donât trust). I know corporations will use ads in the
most manipulative and destructive manner. Laws may be flawed but
are worth the risk.
FeteCommuniste wrote 1 day ago:
The level of trust I have in a promise made by any existing AI company
that such a device would never phone home: 0.
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