7 ms·

Microsoft of course having an excellent reputation for respecting the law and their customers whenever there's significant money to be made by doing the exact o

Microsoft of course having an excellent reputation for respecting the law and their customers whenever there's significant money to be made by doing the exact opposite

muglug 2y ago
There’s significant money to be lost (lawsuits, massive reputations damage) if it was discovered they weee deliberately training on data they had guaranteed that they were not training on.
- blibble 2y ago
  when has the threat of lawsuits or massive reputational damage ever previously stopped Microsoft?
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    You're confusing corporate enterprise plans with home users. Completely different ballgames.
simonw 2y ago
Your company’s data isn’t nearly as valuable for training models as you might think. Certainly not as valuable as the revenue you can make from companies that would instantly cancel their Copliot 365 subscriptions if they heard any hint of data being used for training without permission. Convincing people that you don’t train on their data remains one of the hardest problems: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/
- muglug 2y ago
  This exactly. If Microsoft had created its own fine-tuned-MSFT-data LLM and seen vastly better results on internal tasks, then they’d be publishing papers about it, and also packaging that up & selling to customers.
- blibble 2y ago
  > Certainly not as valuable as the revenue you can make from companies that would instantly cancel their Copliot 365 subscriptions companies already are cancelling their copilot subscriptions as it's "high cost and low value" https://www.businessinsider.com/pharma-cio-cancelled-microsoft-copilot-ai-tool-2024-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/pharma-cio-cancelled-microso... > Convincing people that you don’t train on their data remains one of the hardest problems: we attempted to protect our valuable data with copyright they disregarded these terms, trained on it anyway and claim wholesale reproduction of our work is "fair use" why wouldn't they do the same with Teams/Sharepoint/Word/everything on Azure because the contract with a company 10000x our size says they won't? HAHAHAHAHA the only way to protect your data from entities that have previously disregarded terms in this way is to not let them get their dirty hands on it in the first place
  - simonw 2y ago
    Did you read https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/ ? Because your comment here is a text-book example of what I was talking about there, right up to the bit where you say "you can't trust them because they've already shown they'll train on unlicensed scraped copyrighted data" (a very reasonable point to argue). (Update: actually I didn't make that point in the original post, it's from the talk version of this I gave https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/27/ai-worlds-fair/#slide.032.jpeg https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/27/ai-worlds-fair/#slide.... )

Microsoft of course having an excellent reputation for respecting the law and their customers whenever there's significant money to be made by doing the exact opposite

muglug 2y ago

There’s significant money to be lost (lawsuits, massive reputations damage) if it was discovered they weee deliberately training on data they had guaranteed that they were not training on.

blibble 2y ago
when has the threat of lawsuits or massive reputational damage ever previously stopped Microsoft?
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  You're confusing corporate enterprise plans with home users. Completely different ballgames.

simonw 2y ago

Your company’s data isn’t nearly as valuable for training models as you might think. Certainly not as valuable as the revenue you can make from companies that would instantly cancel their Copliot 365 subscriptions if they heard any hint of data being used for training without permission. Convincing people that you don’t train on their data remains one of the hardest problems: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/

muglug 2y ago
This exactly. If Microsoft had created its own fine-tuned-MSFT-data LLM and seen vastly better results on internal tasks, then they’d be publishing papers about it, and also packaging that up & selling to customers.
blibble 2y ago
> Certainly not as valuable as the revenue you can make from companies that would instantly cancel their Copliot 365 subscriptions companies already are cancelling their copilot subscriptions as it's "high cost and low value" https://www.businessinsider.com/pharma-cio-cancelled-microsoft-copilot-ai-tool-2024-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/pharma-cio-cancelled-microso... > Convincing people that you don’t train on their data remains one of the hardest problems: we attempted to protect our valuable data with copyright they disregarded these terms, trained on it anyway and claim wholesale reproduction of our work is "fair use" why wouldn't they do the same with Teams/Sharepoint/Word/everything on Azure because the contract with a company 10000x our size says they won't? HAHAHAHAHA the only way to protect your data from entities that have previously disregarded terms in this way is to not let them get their dirty hands on it in the first place
- simonw 2y ago
  Did you read https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/ ? Because your comment here is a text-book example of what I was talking about there, right up to the bit where you say "you can't trust them because they've already shown they'll train on unlicensed scraped copyrighted data" (a very reasonable point to argue). (Update: actually I didn't make that point in the original post, it's from the talk version of this I gave https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/27/ai-worlds-fair/#slide.032.jpeg https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/27/ai-worlds-fair/#slide.... )