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> "Sitting in someone's meeting uninvited is violation of privacy. They wanted a bot in the meeting, not an uninvited person," said automation expert Umar Aftab

> "Sitting in someone's meeting uninvited is violation of privacy. They wanted a bot in the meeting, not an uninvited person," said automation expert Umar Aftab. "This way you sabotage trust and could incur legal implications." > "Good luck with all the lawsuits," added another. "This might read like a gritty founder hustle story," said software engineer Mauricio Idarraga. "But it's actually one of the most reckless and tone-deaf posts I've seen in a while." > "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. "In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand." They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay.

mips_avatar 1y ago
Except they were pretty transparent about there being a human in the loop. They were essentially selling an MIT engineering grad as your note taker for $100/mo, which is a steal. Google hires associate product managers from MIT to be note takers for $20k/mo
- 1659447091 1y ago
  The quote taken from the article is: "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. How do you get from 'AI that'll join a meeting' to 'an MIT engineering grad as your note taker'? The rest about note takers is irrelevant when the problem is lying about the "note taker" as that could be the deciding factor for choosing a service, not price
  - mips_avatar 1y ago
    Disclaimer I actually met Sam when he was launching this and I felt like he pitched it at the time as aspiring to make it do all the things. I guess that’s a lie since the ai didn’t work at the time.
bpodgursky 1y ago
Unless there was a violated promise of an on-prem notetaker app, there's absolutely no difference between having a third-party AI and third-party contractor listening to your meetings. You should ALWAYS assume their engineers have access to stored data for maintenance and debugging.
jacquesm 1y ago
It's a lot worse than that. This is a breach, from the perspective of the customers. They now have to explain to whoever was there how they disclosed their confidential information. That's going to become a nice boomerang.
bsder 1y ago
> They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay. Erm, to the customer, what is the difference between a bunch of humans transcribing your meetings or an AI doing it? If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Misleading investors is a different problem.
- 1659447091 1y ago
  > If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Why you, personally, care or not is your business. If you were one of the customers who bought an automated (AI) service and instead got 2 guys gathering info during meetings, and are okay with it and see no difference between them -- then cool-emojis. or for a more pointed response, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935354
  - bsder 1y ago
    The whole point of running a business is that I deliver a particular good for a price we agree on but then how I deliver it is up to me within fairly wide latitude. If, for example, I have found some way to make some equivalent part cheaper, it is NOT incumbent upon me to disclose how I did it to you or my competitors. In order to protect trade secrets that may give away the answer or process to a competitor, I may lie straight to your face to misdirect you or possibly to throw a competitor down the wrong trail. As long as I'm not causing you harm and am delivering to spec, I consider myself to have a lot of latitude. In any AI implementation, the company principals would have access to the data anyway so security wasn't compromised. In fact, because of the fallibility of human memory, security is probably better than running the audio through possibly compromised systems running an AI in a data center god knows where. So, data security and provenance was not harmed. Sure, if you specified not to use indentured labor and I subcontract it to Bangladeshi orphans, you have a right to be upset as the bad PR could harm you. That didn't happen in this instance--the labor was company principals. I see lots of posturing, but nobody pointing to what violations occurred other than not using <jazz hands> "AI". At no point has anyone in this thread demonstrated any harm to the end user beyond some very vague insinuations of "wrongdoing". Instead, what I see is a bunch of people getting upset that they used "Disgusting Pixie Dust (direct employee labor)" instead of "Delicious Pixie Dust (AI)". If I'm being snide, I would point out that when the direction of substitution is reversed (AI instead of labor)--the HN legions would be celebrating the cleverness. If I'm being particularly snide, I would chalk the anger up to the fact that it nicely demonstrated that the AI Emperor isn't wearing any clothes and is making a bunch of people angry whose paychecks depend upon the emperor remaining naked. Now, if they were pitching their "Custom AI" to investors while hand transcribing, that is a very, very different kettle of fish.

mips_avatar 1y ago

Except they were pretty transparent about there being a human in the loop. They were essentially selling an MIT engineering grad as your note taker for $100/mo, which is a steal. Google hires associate product managers from MIT to be note takers for $20k/mo

1659447091 1y ago
The quote taken from the article is: "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. How do you get from 'AI that'll join a meeting' to 'an MIT engineering grad as your note taker'? The rest about note takers is irrelevant when the problem is lying about the "note taker" as that could be the deciding factor for choosing a service, not price
- mips_avatar 1y ago
  Disclaimer I actually met Sam when he was launching this and I felt like he pitched it at the time as aspiring to make it do all the things. I guess that’s a lie since the ai didn’t work at the time.

bpodgursky 1y ago

Unless there was a violated promise of an on-prem notetaker app, there's absolutely no difference between having a third-party AI and third-party contractor listening to your meetings. You should ALWAYS assume their engineers have access to stored data for maintenance and debugging.

jacquesm 1y ago

It's a lot worse than that. This is a breach, from the perspective of the customers. They now have to explain to whoever was there how they disclosed their confidential information. That's going to become a nice boomerang.

bsder 1y ago

> They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay. Erm, to the customer, what is the difference between a bunch of humans transcribing your meetings or an AI doing it? If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Misleading investors is a different problem.

1659447091 1y ago
> If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Why you, personally, care or not is your business. If you were one of the customers who bought an automated (AI) service and instead got 2 guys gathering info during meetings, and are okay with it and see no difference between them -- then cool-emojis. or for a more pointed response, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935354
- bsder 1y ago
  The whole point of running a business is that I deliver a particular good for a price we agree on but then how I deliver it is up to me within fairly wide latitude. If, for example, I have found some way to make some equivalent part cheaper, it is NOT incumbent upon me to disclose how I did it to you or my competitors. In order to protect trade secrets that may give away the answer or process to a competitor, I may lie straight to your face to misdirect you or possibly to throw a competitor down the wrong trail. As long as I'm not causing you harm and am delivering to spec, I consider myself to have a lot of latitude. In any AI implementation, the company principals would have access to the data anyway so security wasn't compromised. In fact, because of the fallibility of human memory, security is probably better than running the audio through possibly compromised systems running an AI in a data center god knows where. So, data security and provenance was not harmed. Sure, if you specified not to use indentured labor and I subcontract it to Bangladeshi orphans, you have a right to be upset as the bad PR could harm you. That didn't happen in this instance--the labor was company principals. I see lots of posturing, but nobody pointing to what violations occurred other than not using <jazz hands> "AI". At no point has anyone in this thread demonstrated any harm to the end user beyond some very vague insinuations of "wrongdoing". Instead, what I see is a bunch of people getting upset that they used "Disgusting Pixie Dust (direct employee labor)" instead of "Delicious Pixie Dust (AI)". If I'm being snide, I would point out that when the direction of substitution is reversed (AI instead of labor)--the HN legions would be celebrating the cleverness. If I'm being particularly snide, I would chalk the anger up to the fact that it nicely demonstrated that the AI Emperor isn't wearing any clothes and is making a bunch of people angry whose paychecks depend upon the emperor remaining naked. Now, if they were pitching their "Custom AI" to investors while hand transcribing, that is a very, very different kettle of fish.