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if FSF wants a intelligent assistant it will have to collect usage data, no? a little against the whole principle... but if the data are open, that would be kin
by tmsldd 10y ago
if FSF wants a intelligent assistant it will have to collect usage data, no? a little against the whole principle... but if the data are open, that would be kind of cool ;)
- webmaven 10y ago> if FSF wants a intelligent assistant it will have to collect usage data Well, not necessarily (although that is certainly the path of least resistance). However, even if data collection is necessary, there are ways of doing it in a privacy- and freedom-respecting manner.
- pdimitar 10y agoGathering data in privacy- and freedom-respecting manner is something I'd really like to learn about. Any sources or reading material for this?
- webmaven 10y agoSure: At a process level look at how researchers share anonymized data about patients in clinical trials for one example. Technical solutions (some of which use cryptographic techniques) exist as well, many of which are described in Peter Wayner's book Translucent Databases: http://www.wayner.org/node/39 http://www.wayner.org/node/39
- carussell 10y agoAn AI-driven assistant doesn't have to necessarily run on someone else's servers and be under their control to be useful. In fact, if I teach my assistant patterns like how when I say "David" I mean David O, then I don't see a) why this type of learning can't be fully localized, or b) how phoning home with this kind of data is going to be of any particular use to anybody else, anyway. To put it another way, what's wrong with letting my Siri and your Siri just be two different "people" instead of feeding back into a single, networked hivemind?
- icebraining 10y agoI'm not involved in AI projects, but my understanding is that current state-of-the-art work, including in digital assistance components like speech recognition, the approach involves gathering large amounts of data and throwing it into deep learning algorithms. This is why Google had free services like Voice, which served as sources for their modelling data.
- flukus 10y agoIMO this is a bunch of BS by companies that want to control and centralize computing. Years ago we had products like Dragon naturally speaking that could do full voice dictation reasonably accurately. They had limited digital assistants too (which is a subset of full dictation, much less valid inputs), though not much more limited than today. These ran on Pentium 1's. The downside to this was the training time, but in practice I found this to be a strength. It was trained to my voice, not whatever generic profile Google stocks me into. I got better results nearly two decades ago (got a Dragon demo in a carnival bag) than I get with Google voice today.
- tmsldd 10y ago> what's wrong with letting my Siri and your Siri just be two different "people" instead of feeding back into a single, networked hivemind? Absolutely nothing wrong.. that would be great, actually. Question is how to do that without data and GPUs.
- rwallace 10y agoIt's perfectly okay to say, if you want to get the most out of this program, you need a big GPU rig. The price of such should come down over time. That leaves the question of how to get the data. If you make it optional, will enough people opt in? Is it an acceptable compromise to make it opt-out?
- tmsldd 10y agoYour idea of opt-{in, out} is a good one. It would integrate enough data with time, I think. "Open Data Foundation" + "World Wide Distributed Processing" would really make a revolution here. We need break urgently the monopoly over data.
- flukus 10y agoWe had them running on desktops in the 90's. They didn't take off because they simply aren't that useful.