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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

What the article barely touches upon is that all currently available AIs-as-a-service

- permit themselves to store and use your inputs essentially as they see fit, for essentially any purpose

- have mechanisms designed to "prevent abuse", without defining what that actually means

- are engineered to "keep you safe", without stating clearly what they want to keep you safe from, and without any option to disable those so-called safeguards

- have been carefully tuned to align their outputs with the Upper Middle Class U.S. West Coast Tech Scene political zeitgeist of the day, and that is what you'll get from them, even if it is completely inappropriate in your own cultural environment.

Caveat emptor.

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Caveat emptor indeed. LLM-as-a-Service vendors know their customer and this customer’s needs. It’s not you. They’re selling an API to companies for whom safety and governance are part of the value proposition.

As others have mentioned, the data retention aspect is specifically /not/ an issue with OpenAI (and other vendors’) APIs.

I don’t really get the saltiness so many on this site have towards LLM vendors. It just sounds entitled.

It's sort of frustrating to know that OpenAI has a better model that wouldn't cost them anything to release, but they don't do it for PR/whatever reasons.

What “better model”? If you’re referring to whatever LLM GPT-4 was before RLHF, by what measure might this model be better? As I pointed out above, what OpenAI is selling is “best” for their customers.

there is a particular type of person, who, when presented with a marvelous new thing (idea, product, person), focuses on its flaws rather than its unique merits.

we need them to ensure an equitable and sustainable world, but they do not drive progress. i bet they are also as a group far less successful and happy throughout their miserable lives. most will just impotently fart their misery unto others, and only a rare few will actually do something about it…

…at which point they wrap around back to becoming makers of imperfect things for the next round of criticism.

Agree with most of this, but your first point is not true of OpenAI. Their terms of service forbid them from training on API inputs unless you explicitly opt in.

That's totally false, and you can't even save a chat history on ChatGPT unless you leave this option set to on.

OpenAI API is not ChatGPT UI

And the prior poster is right, OpenAI API eula/tos clearly state data is not retained by default. I've been involved with legal counsel reviews, on that point there's zero ambiguity.

To be clear, API data is retained for 30 days, to be used for determining usage policy violations.

Whole point of ChatGPT is to collect data to do reinforcement learning, gp is talking about API access which has different terms (and wasn't banned in eu because of that).

> Whole point of ChatGPT is to collect data to do reinforcement learning

No, the point of ChatGPT is to provide a UI to chat with GPT models. Taking the data generated by users and using it for commercial purposes without consent is very likely to be illegal in the EU. Unfortunately they often take years to tackle this kind of stuff.

It does comply with EU GDPR laws -- EU users are allowed to opt out of training. This was after regulators in Italy shut it down. The US FTC is investigating too.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ftc-opens-investigatio...

To comply with GDPR it has to be opt in, and choosing not to opt in has to not affect the app's functionality.

Currently, it's opt-out, and doing so destroys your chat history. They did manage to satisfy Italian regulators but I expect they'll get called out on this more thoroughly in the future.

Or maybe they just changed the way this works for Italy?

I doubt there's enough enforcement behind that to make it plausible.

I don't see why the guarantees you get by using e.g. Azure's LLM api are any different from the ones you get when using Azure for anything.

I guess I can see why you would trust AWS/Azure/GCP over OpenAI, since they are bigger companies arguably with more to lose.

What is a casual or nontechnical poweruser to do if the user wants to use LLM for work or education , without worry of the many points you mention?

Simple. Just stop worrying them. They're non-issues for average "casual or nontechnical powerusers".

Nah. Give it 10 years and it'll be the Robinhood fiasco all over again.

Instead of anticipated trades, all these nontechnical power users with novel ideas will make the mistake of telling them to an AI-- and had their ideas stolen and rushed to market by whoever paid for access to mine the logs companies told us they weren't collecting.

We already don't trust cloud providers not to spy on our infrastructure. There is little consequence in lying to us. AI will bring us IP theft at scale.

Don't discuss anything sensitive or groundbreaking with cloud LLMs. No Google Collab, no OpenAI, nothing.

Make do with a local LLM in the form of a Vicuna 13/30B GGML. And even there, you have to watch out for backdoors in Gradio/posthog or weird models that insist on you enabling remote code execution. This domain is unbelievably shady and I can only assume it's because of the low-level access it provides to our collective stream of consciousness.

This is going to turn out to be bad news long term. Don't trust cloud LLMs.

If it's free, you're the product.

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