5 ms·

It seems beyond naive, rather malicious, to upload any useful private data to SaaS LLMs. Like, you are letting them data mine your business. Why are corporatio

It seems beyond naive, rather malicious, to upload any useful private data to SaaS LLMs. Like, you are letting them data mine your business. Why are corporations not panicing over this?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
m11a 3mo ago
Most corporations likely have zero data retention agreements with LLM providers, at least for API usage. (Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.)
- dataflow 3mo ago
  > (Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.) Is actual ZDR verbiage in contracts more specific and limited in scope than what we see advertised publicly ("...except where needed to comply with law or combat misuse" in Anthropic's case)? Because those seem pretty damn vague and large enough holes to drive trucks through.
  - lukewarm707 3mo ago
    to combat misuse, we must store and read all prompts and responses. ;) to comply with the law, we must send to the police our detections of illegal activity >:| a guy subpeonaed your chats, i guess we stored them (oops) so now it's illegal to destroy it...
  - m11a 3mo ago
    It depends on the model provider. OpenAI's is very limited and precisely written. Plus, open-source models hosted on SaaS inference providers tend to come with a strong ZDR agreement too.
- failbuffer 3mo ago
  These firms were completely fine with mass copyright infringement. And the temptation to keep data would be great, especially as they fight for every bit of technical advantage in a market that "wants" to be commodified.
  - davkan 3mo ago
    Well they abused fair use and pretended llm learning was the same as human learning. Enough gray area to risk court. A lot less gray area when there are signed contracts involved saying they won’t I think.
prodigycorp 3mo ago
because corporations are using providers with ZDR in the contract. If OAI or any of the cloud providers violate this they're getting sued to oblivion.
- dofm 3mo ago
  The problem is that there is an enormous, nearly unignorable incentive to work around it. So they will. As the customer base becomes more and more corporate (which it will), they end up with disproportionately more customers whose experiences cannot be used to train the model to make it better for those customers. Either way, corporate customers cannot leach off the training from consumers handing over their personal data forever; there aren't enough specialists in that training set to improve the models with no loss of corporate trust. Betrayal of their trust is inevitable.
  - WarmWash 3mo ago
    Conspiracies are for the chronically online
    - dofm 3mo ago
      This is not a conspiracy theory. It's futurology, maybe, but pretty basic stuff at that. At some point, where does the training advantage for specialist LLMs come from, if not progressively encroaching on customer data for the benefit of equivalent customers?
    - rightbyte 3mo ago
      It is rather vague whether you count Sam Altman et al. as "chronically online".
- coffeefirst 3mo ago
  These are the same people who performed the largest scale breach of copyright in history on the theory that they could get away with it. I’m not making any accusations, but we should not underestimate their tolerance for legal and financial risk. It may be a little paranoid to insist on self hosting based on that, but I’m not so sure that it’s crazy.
api 3mo ago
Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option." How many people would take it? I know I'd actually be tempted. Con: total loss of privacy. Pro: it folds laundry, and I f'ing loathe laundry with the intensity of a billion suns. Every business has similar trade-offs they'd be tempted to take.
- em-bee 3mo ago
  i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is education to respect peoples privacy and very harsh punishments for violations. i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for personal interest. the key in any case will be education, because without it abuse will be rampant and progress will halt because everyone is going to be suspicious of everyone else.
  - toofy 3mo ago
    > i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is… i’m not sure why so many of us have fallen into this… “there is no other future” thing… there are other options. plenty of them. there is no singular solution. we could always just say “no”. and that’s that. that would be one option. why do we feel like there is no other way? why are we afraid to say “nah”?
    - Calazon 3mo ago
      I suspect because some of these things would require us all to say no, which is difficult to coordinate and enforce. It's not impossible, but it's not as easy as "just" saying no, as a society.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
When you say private, I assume you mean proprietary. This isn't about HIPAA or PII but rather about trade secrets and the like. Companies are not panicking because no humans are driving that panic, and we aren't driving that panic because either: - we haven't thought about it deeply, or - we've thought about it deeply enough to understand that humans don't benefit when companies act as data gatekeepers. In neither case are we likely to raise the alarm. If we let them, companies will play zero sum games over "intellectual property" ad infinitum while humans get nothing useful out of the relationship. We're better off when they compete on execution and worse off when they compete in court re: the ownership of abstractions, so there's no reason to encourage the latter sort of behavior.

It seems beyond naive, rather malicious, to upload any useful private data to SaaS LLMs. Like, you are letting them data mine your business. Why are corporations not panicing over this?

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

m11a 3mo ago

Most corporations likely have zero data retention agreements with LLM providers, at least for API usage. (Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.)

dataflow 3mo ago
> (Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.) Is actual ZDR verbiage in contracts more specific and limited in scope than what we see advertised publicly ("...except where needed to comply with law or combat misuse" in Anthropic's case)? Because those seem pretty damn vague and large enough holes to drive trucks through.
- lukewarm707 3mo ago
  to combat misuse, we must store and read all prompts and responses. ;) to comply with the law, we must send to the police our detections of illegal activity >:| a guy subpeonaed your chats, i guess we stored them (oops) so now it's illegal to destroy it...
- m11a 3mo ago
  It depends on the model provider. OpenAI's is very limited and precisely written. Plus, open-source models hosted on SaaS inference providers tend to come with a strong ZDR agreement too.
failbuffer 3mo ago
These firms were completely fine with mass copyright infringement. And the temptation to keep data would be great, especially as they fight for every bit of technical advantage in a market that "wants" to be commodified.
- davkan 3mo ago
  Well they abused fair use and pretended llm learning was the same as human learning. Enough gray area to risk court. A lot less gray area when there are signed contracts involved saying they won’t I think.

prodigycorp 3mo ago

because corporations are using providers with ZDR in the contract. If OAI or any of the cloud providers violate this they're getting sued to oblivion.

dofm 3mo ago
The problem is that there is an enormous, nearly unignorable incentive to work around it. So they will. As the customer base becomes more and more corporate (which it will), they end up with disproportionately more customers whose experiences cannot be used to train the model to make it better for those customers. Either way, corporate customers cannot leach off the training from consumers handing over their personal data forever; there aren't enough specialists in that training set to improve the models with no loss of corporate trust. Betrayal of their trust is inevitable.
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  Conspiracies are for the chronically online
  - dofm 3mo ago
    This is not a conspiracy theory. It's futurology, maybe, but pretty basic stuff at that. At some point, where does the training advantage for specialist LLMs come from, if not progressively encroaching on customer data for the benefit of equivalent customers?
  - rightbyte 3mo ago
    It is rather vague whether you count Sam Altman et al. as "chronically online".
coffeefirst 3mo ago
These are the same people who performed the largest scale breach of copyright in history on the theory that they could get away with it. I’m not making any accusations, but we should not underestimate their tolerance for legal and financial risk. It may be a little paranoid to insist on self hosting based on that, but I’m not so sure that it’s crazy.

api 3mo ago

Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option." How many people would take it? I know I'd actually be tempted. Con: total loss of privacy. Pro: it folds laundry, and I f'ing loathe laundry with the intensity of a billion suns. Every business has similar trade-offs they'd be tempted to take.

em-bee 3mo ago
i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is education to respect peoples privacy and very harsh punishments for violations. i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for personal interest. the key in any case will be education, because without it abuse will be rampant and progress will halt because everyone is going to be suspicious of everyone else.
- toofy 3mo ago
  > i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is… i’m not sure why so many of us have fallen into this… “there is no other future” thing… there are other options. plenty of them. there is no singular solution. we could always just say “no”. and that’s that. that would be one option. why do we feel like there is no other way? why are we afraid to say “nah”?
  - Calazon 3mo ago
    I suspect because some of these things would require us all to say no, which is difficult to coordinate and enforce. It's not impossible, but it's not as easy as "just" saying no, as a society.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago

When you say private, I assume you mean proprietary. This isn't about HIPAA or PII but rather about trade secrets and the like. Companies are not panicking because no humans are driving that panic, and we aren't driving that panic because either: - we haven't thought about it deeply, or - we've thought about it deeply enough to understand that humans don't benefit when companies act as data gatekeepers. In neither case are we likely to raise the alarm. If we let them, companies will play zero sum games over "intellectual property" ad infinitum while humans get nothing useful out of the relationship. We're better off when they compete on execution and worse off when they compete in court re: the ownership of abstractions, so there's no reason to encourage the latter sort of behavior.