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To get pleasantries out of the way, I am glad to see Matt Turck here on HN. The meetup he hosts, Data Driven NYC, attracts a large number of both very high cali

by aleyan 12y ago

To get pleasantries out of the way, I am glad to see Matt Turck here on HN. The meetup he hosts, Data Driven NYC, attracts a large number of both very high caliber of guest speakers and attendees. The several times I have been there, I enjoyed the presentations and the discussions afterwards thoroughly. X.ai which I was introduced to at this meetup, was one of the more interesting startups there. If I wasn't as happy as I am at Handy, x.ai would be foremost among companies I would consider working at; their challenges are many. This is one of the highest endorsements can be bestowed upon a firm and its product by an engineer. While x.ai is very exciting, I have several concerns about their product and their chances at success. 1) Most meetings are scheduled internally within a firm where calendars are visible and shared. An AI PA that simply locks down time slots doesn't have much value add beyond what the calendars currently provide. 2) There are privacy concerns. Many will not trust x.ai with their calendar data due to concerns about x.ai data-mining or sharing their data. 3) There are other privacy concerns. People may not trust Amy and Andrew not to be social engineered by others to leak their calendars. The fact that person is busy at a certain time or for a certain duration or within a certain vicinity is potentially useful to people whose goals are more than just scheduling a meeting. This kind of over sharing may not be worse than goes on with Facebook, but the letters A.I. will make it sound scarier. My last point is a wish. Most of my non-work meetings are scheduled over #1 text messaging and #2 Facebook. I would like to see x.ai support other mediums than just email.

lbotos 12y ago
Why does the A.I. part of the situation make social engineering scarier?
- aleyan 12y ago
  1) Perceived Risk. AI makes any activity 10 times scarier than same activity without. People will irrationally fear that their AI PA turns into HAL 9000[1] or their self-driving car turns into Project Satan[2]. 2) Actual Risk. Software has bugs. When software is meant to give out some subset of data it is not unknown for it to give out more data than it means to. A human PA may make mistakes and blurb something that he/she shouldn't have, but he/she also knows when to stop giving out information. If a particularly trained AI starts leaking out information, it will happily do so for user after user after user. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 [2] http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan
graycat 12y ago
Where's the AI part? The video clip talked about learning -- what's to learn? For the sharing of calendars, why is that necessary? So, my software sends you and three other people e-mail asking for a meeting with all of us somewhere in NYC Midtown next week. So, each of you sends back some candidate times. If you have the same software, it grabs the e-mail (say, from some tag in the header lines) and sends back to my e-mail some candidate times. My software answers, and there is a negotiation. If each person invited has the same software, then the software can negotiate, very soon, when all the software agents can be available to negotiate with my software agent, and then the negotiation can go really fast. Sure, if your software proposes several times and my software won't accept any of those, then someone looking at the e-mail flows could find times when I was busy. A biggie? Maybe not. Once all the agents are available, they could negotiate how to communicate peer to peer, that is, faster than e-mail, and really extensive negotiations could be done in less than a second. And the peer to peer traffic could be encrypted and, really, not easily available otherwise, that is, relatively secure. My agent could have my appointments already and know when I will be at a meeting in NJ and consider my travel time to NYC Midtown to know when I could be available at Midtown. What else to do? What's wrong with that outline? Where's the AI or the learning needed? Yes, there could be some high push for virality and a network effect. But, then, still, there's no very good barrier to entry. I.e., it's awfully easy to program, and if the scheduling software of some one company wants to schedule only with other copies of their software, then a disrupting company could offer to have open communications and be willing to schedule with other software. Then this little idea would go for nearly a freebie, and no one would make any money. Ah, but encrypted communications and communicating with other software combine to yield a security problem -- anyone could write fake software that would report the unencrypted data. More generally, does look hackable so that there would be security risks. Maybe a must-have for some people, but if they are meeting outside their office then there's a lot of travel likely. In that case, maybe use video conferencing. I don't see much of a business opportunity there.
- fchollet 12y ago
  > Where's the AI needed? Marketing, I assume. Giving people their very own Jarvis to interact with could be a selling point (even if it's less efficient than a GUI-based scheduling solution), and the "AI" buzzword will certainly draw more attention to the product than a scheduling app would normally get.

by aleyan 12y ago

lbotos 12y ago

Why does the A.I. part of the situation make social engineering scarier?

aleyan 12y ago
1) Perceived Risk. AI makes any activity 10 times scarier than same activity without. People will irrationally fear that their AI PA turns into HAL 9000[1] or their self-driving car turns into Project Satan[2]. 2) Actual Risk. Software has bugs. When software is meant to give out some subset of data it is not unknown for it to give out more data than it means to. A human PA may make mistakes and blurb something that he/she shouldn't have, but he/she also knows when to stop giving out information. If a particularly trained AI starts leaking out information, it will happily do so for user after user after user. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 [2] http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Satan

graycat 12y ago

Where's the AI part? The video clip talked about learning -- what's to learn? For the sharing of calendars, why is that necessary? So, my software sends you and three other people e-mail asking for a meeting with all of us somewhere in NYC Midtown next week. So, each of you sends back some candidate times. If you have the same software, it grabs the e-mail (say, from some tag in the header lines) and sends back to my e-mail some candidate times. My software answers, and there is a negotiation. If each person invited has the same software, then the software can negotiate, very soon, when all the software agents can be available to negotiate with my software agent, and then the negotiation can go really fast. Sure, if your software proposes several times and my software won't accept any of those, then someone looking at the e-mail flows could find times when I was busy. A biggie? Maybe not. Once all the agents are available, they could negotiate how to communicate peer to peer, that is, faster than e-mail, and really extensive negotiations could be done in less than a second. And the peer to peer traffic could be encrypted and, really, not easily available otherwise, that is, relatively secure. My agent could have my appointments already and know when I will be at a meeting in NJ and consider my travel time to NYC Midtown to know when I could be available at Midtown. What else to do? What's wrong with that outline? Where's the AI or the learning needed? Yes, there could be some high push for virality and a network effect. But, then, still, there's no very good barrier to entry. I.e., it's awfully easy to program, and if the scheduling software of some one company wants to schedule only with other copies of their software, then a disrupting company could offer to have open communications and be willing to schedule with other software. Then this little idea would go for nearly a freebie, and no one would make any money. Ah, but encrypted communications and communicating with other software combine to yield a security problem -- anyone could write fake software that would report the unencrypted data. More generally, does look hackable so that there would be security risks. Maybe a must-have for some people, but if they are meeting outside their office then there's a lot of travel likely. In that case, maybe use video conferencing. I don't see much of a business opportunity there.

fchollet 12y ago
> Where's the AI needed? Marketing, I assume. Giving people their very own Jarvis to interact with could be a selling point (even if it's less efficient than a GUI-based scheduling solution), and the "AI" buzzword will certainly draw more attention to the product than a scheduling app would normally get.