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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

There's never going to be a democratization of AI without a democratization of the data. But the data itself comes from privacy violating surveillance so I don't think we really want democratization of data.

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I'm confident that in 20 years we'll have a very different conception of privacy. Certainly, one of the worst privacy outcomes would be if government had a monopoly on ubiquitous surveillance.

Already I don't expect to be anonymous in any public location. Given a public enough lifestyle and enough acquaintances, the likelihood of someone recognizing you anywhere on the globe or in a random pub is non-negligible.

I agree that we will have a different conception of privacy. I'm hopeful (but not particularly optimistic) that we can have something like David Brin's "Transparent Society" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society).

I like that term "sousveillance". It's tough to communicate the concept with phrases when folks tend to skim rather than read carefully.

You could share the pre-trained models that take tons and tons of data and compute time to generate? The models themselves are abstract enough to be considered anonymous, by their very nature.. I think.

Take a look at the literature on de-anonymization. It's easier than you might think.

De-anonymization of data or of trained neural-nets? I've read somewhere that you can sort of 'squash' a trained net down into a simpler version for performance benefits - the caveat being that it can't do any more learning. I would think that'd make it harder to de-anonymize.

If you simplify the function, you throw away accuracy (or maybe gain, if you over-simplified). The less accurate, the harder to de-anonymize. However, you only need 32 bits of information to uniquely identify someone.

s/over-simplified/over-fit/

Completely this. The companies talking about "democratization of AI" means "yeah, come use the models we built" but the data is the real source a democratization of AI should be focusing on. That's where the source of power is.

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