Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

The premise here is that the AI is operating at the behest of someone else.

Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. "It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsively" and then avoid presenting you with purchasing decisions at those times etc. It will digest both ad-laden blogspam and human psych research papers so it can present the information you want stripped of the manipulative context in which it was originally presented.

It has to be a user agent and not a corporate agent or we're all screwed.

View on HN

We've been trying to push FOSS software into peoples lives for many decades now and they still mostly opt for stuff from the big tech. It is very likely that the same will happen again with AI unfortunately.

The most popular web browsers are open source. Android is open source and the extent that it isn't is the extent that they're running into anti-trust claims. A sizable chunk of the population uses ad blockers.

"People don't care" is at best defeatism and at worst explicit propaganda designed to discourage people from making the attempt. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It works more often when you try than when you don't.

The most popular web browsers use open source, but none of Chrome, Edge, or Safari are open source web browsers. They are proprietary freeware.

The difference between Chrome and Chromium is that Chrome is marginally worse but largely identical. People mostly install Chrome instead of Chromium by accident because Google markets Chrome and they don't know that Chromium exists and the differences are things they don't strongly care about.

But if Chrome ever started doing something they don't like and actually care about, anyone could instantly switch to Chromium and the only difference they'd notice is that it's not doing the thing they don't like anymore.

Sure, but that statement, while true, does not make Chromium one of 'the most popular web browsers.'

Doesn't it? It's the same codebase as Chrome, and not in the sense that they used to be. They still are. Changes to one go into the other. And that code is open source, so anybody who doesn't like what Google is doing with it can create a fork, just like with any other open source project.

Arguing that it isn't because the most popular distribution has some proprietary bits in it is like arguing that it isn't because the most popular operating system it runs on is Windows. It doesn't change the fact that if the browser defects against you, you can fork it.

As you wrote, it is not the same code base. It "has some proprietary bits."

People have forked it. Is ungoogled Chromium the same codebase as Chrome? What about the Vanadium? Brave? Edge? Opera?

Darwin is (or "was" as it no longer really exists) not macOS either, even though changes in macOS went into Darwin.

The relevant distinction is, is it different enough to have to care? If Chrome suddenly adopts some offensive behavior, how much trouble is it to use Chromium instead? And it's easy.

Whereas if you want to use Darwin instead of macOS, it will be missing some things you're immediately going to notice, like the macOS GUI.

No, it is not.

For those who want to avoid Google altogether, switching to Chromium does not solve those issues. From https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/09/open_source_unbranded...

"there are 50 or so Google services that have been integrated in the Chromium code base."

"The services are free but have commercial value by providing data that can be used to inform advertising and marketing algorithms, or in some cases, such as Google Pay, have more obvious benefit to the provider."

> switching to Chromium does not solve those issues.

But it allows them to be solved. Then if you don't like Google services, you can remove them, as some have done:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungoogled-chromium

Which I have already pointed out.

But then I'm not sure what your objection is.

You wrote "The most popular web browsers are open source."

That is not true. I replied: "The most popular web browsers use open source, but none of Chrome, Edge, or Safari are open source web browsers."

Chromium is not one of the popular web browsers.

If it is, tell me how many people use it compared to Chrome.

I also asked "Is ungoogled Chromium the same codebase as Chrome? What about Vanadium? Brave? Edge? Opera?"

While android base is open source(and I appreciate google for that), no major phone vendor uses exclusively open source components. They always adds own proprietary apps and services also most of the time google's. IMO no better than an iphone.

That's the anti-trust thing.

If Google still wanted to "don't be evil" they'd switch to a license that requires OEMs to allow the user to install custom Android forks on the device.

Most open models of useful size will be trained on lots of free data scraped from the Internet. Whatever patterns repeat the most show up in AI’s behavior. That includes advertising, political indoctrination, and trendy topics. Many open models are also trained by advertising companies. Most then have moral alignment built into them that reflects their creator’s values, not usually ours.

So, I think what you said can help. It’s definitely not the whole solution, though, since the pre-training and fine-tuning often have similar problems. We’ll need people curating the datasets to remove these problems. The open-source components are just a start.

> Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device.

I agree that AI could be a massive asset to people and help improve our lives if it worked for us and our interests. Sadly that's not how things seem to work out. Every piece of technology on offer today seems to work for someone else. Our phones, our cars, our TVs, our computers, our appliances, even our medical devices. All of our tech works for other someone other than the person who paid for it and mostly so that companies can exploit us while delivering only a fraction of what those devices are capable of. Features are often locked or paywalled off to extract more money or encourage additional purchases or to prevent you from blocking ads or taking back control of your hardware and the software it runs. Our usage is monitored and data collected to be used against us later.

Even now AI is largely controlled by private companies. Even as the hardware requirements to run AI locally go down, we'll never compete with companies like facebook, google, and microsoft in terms of the size of the datasets they have to train with. Worse I think we're starting to see efforts by corporations to push for laws that limit the ability for people to use AI. They'll say it's too dangerous to let regular people use AI, and that only they can be trusted with such power.

> Every piece of technology on offer today seems to work for someone else.

You can buy a commodity PC and install Debian on it. Some people do.

> Even as the hardware requirements to run AI locally go down, we'll never compete with companies like facebook, google, and microsoft in terms of the size of the datasets they have to train with.

Most of these datasets are public.

> Worse I think we're starting to see efforts by corporations to push for laws that limit the ability for people to use AI. They'll say it's too dangerous to let regular people use AI, and that only they can be trusted with such power.

Of course they will. But the "AI is bad" rhetoric only feeds into that. What do you expect an "AI is bad" bill to look like? It will be the one that restricts access to only large institutions.

> You can buy a commodity PC and install Debian on it.

But your motherboard will still be full of chips that are closed and proprietary and some of them will have their own OS with network/wireless access that you'll have no control over. You'll just have to trust that the Intel Management Engine backdoor and radio chipsets you have no access to aren't taking advantage of you.

> Most of these datasets are public.

Most of everything Google has indexed and cached is "public". Libraries are filled with the same books Google has already scanned. Good luck using the entire internet and your local library to train your own personal AI though.

Microsoft has access to an incredible amount of non-public data including the emails of corporations using outlook and the files on people's hard drive. If they were to fully leverage their access to train AI you'd have a hard time keeping up. Facebook has every post and "private" message ever sent on the platform including ones that were deleted years ago. We can't expect a few publicly released datasets to compare to what they're capable of getting.

Even if we had that kind of access to raw data, could we realistically process it? https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/ai-training-costs-how-much-is...

> But the "AI is bad" rhetoric only feeds into that. What do you expect an "AI is bad" bill to look like? It will be the one that restricts access to only large institutions.

There are a lot of different versions of "AI is bad". One is "AI is bad when it's only controlled by corporations", but that's not what the laws will be about. They're more likely to say that "AI is bad" because of terrorists and spammers and pedos or whatever other boogeymen they can summon up to scare the ignorant and provide some justification for keeping that power out of the public's hands.

> You'll just have to trust that the Intel Management Engine backdoor and radio chipsets you have no access to aren't taking advantage of you.

And that's dumb and we should fix it, but there is no evidence that they are actually doing this. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that e.g. John Deere or Apple is doing this.

> Good luck using the entire internet and your local library to train your own personal AI though.

Presumably you would use Common Crawl and Project Gutenberg etc.

> Microsoft has access to an incredible amount of non-public data including the emails of corporations using outlook and the files on people's hard drive. If they were to fully leverage their access to train AI you'd have a hard time keeping up.

Then they'd set their credibility on fire, lose their customers and get sued because their model would be capable of emitting all of their customers' confidential private information.

> Even if we had that kind of access to raw data, could we realistically process it?

Yes. Training is a fixed cost that can be amortized over everyone using the model. There are various methods of spreading the cost or funding the model:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39964361

> There are a lot of different versions of "AI is bad". One is "AI is bad when it's only controlled by corporations"

That one isn't really "AI is bad" at all, it's really "market concentration is bad" and has nothing to do with AI except insofar as AI is another thing that could be monopolized by robber barons.

> They're more likely to say that "AI is bad" because of terrorists and spammers and pedos or whatever other boogeymen they can summon up to scare the ignorant and provide some justification for keeping that power out of the public's hands.

These justifications are all horse manure and should be repeated only sarcastically in the tone of Helen Lovejoy.

AI is bad in the same way that electricity is bad. "Electricity could be used by pedos" is an argument so weak that the only thing it proves is that the person offering it is arguing in bad faith.

> The premise here is that the AI is operating at the behest of someone else.

> Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device.

Not gonna happen. The trend is to have less and less control over the devices you own. My TV's OS show me ads, not because I wanted them, but because the manufacturer wants to make more money. There are no open source TVs.

As soon as any consumer device gets an internet connection, it starts working against its users (for a recent example, see cars, which are increasingly "connected" and allow the manufactures to sell driving data to 3rd parties for embarrassingly small amounts of money).

> The trend is to have less and less control over the devices you own.

Markets are two-sided. Stop patronizing companies that abuse you. If you can't find a viable alternative, instead cause problems for them on purpose. Contact support and waste their time hearing your complaints. Buy the device from the retailer where they get the highest margins so you can leave a bad review, then return it and buy a used one instead. Figure out how to root it and publish your work.

Don't be afraid to behave adversarially towards your adversary.

> There are no open source TVs.

There are still dumb TVs that don't connect to the internet. These often cost more, because the adversarial advertising subsidizes the price of the "smart" TVs. But the "smart" TVs still have an HDMI port that you can plug whatever you want into, so the typical move is to buy the smart TV and then use an external device to display video and never connect the TV to the internet.

> As soon as any consumer device gets an internet connection, it starts working against its users

So don't give it an internet connection, and if it doesn't operate in that condition then return it. Don't be a doormat.

>> The trend is to have less and less control over the devices you own.

> Markets are two-sided. Stop patronizing companies that abuse you.

The market can't fix this. That's a fantasy.

The manufactures all have an incentive to do this, and a combination of asymmetric information and users being like frogs in a pot mean they'll suffer little to no blowback. The market converges on devices that turn against their users.

> If you can't find a viable alternative, instead cause problems for them on purpose. Contact support and waste their time hearing your complaints. Buy the device from the retailer where they get the highest margins so you can leave a bad review, then return it and buy a used one instead.

Those are totally impractical suggestions. The weirdos willing to tilt at windmills over this can have no noticeable effect.

> Figure out how to root it and publish your work.

Rooting a device takes a lot of work, if it's even possible at all. Volunteers just don't have the combination of skills and dedicated man-hours to make that a practical alternative across the consumer device space, except maybe in some unusual cases.

> The market can't fix this. That's a fantasy.

Competitive markets would fix this immediately. The main problem is that some markets are concentrated enough for suppliers to collude, and people keep telling themselves that there is nothing they can do because they've been conditioned by the sort of arguments you're repeating into being submissive and compliant.

> The manufactures all have an incentive to do this

And the customers all have an incentive to choose the one that doesn't, putting any manufacturer willing to respect the customer at a competitive advantage.

Unless you convince customers that they can't actually do this and should just learn to love the boot stomping on their face and buy from the companies defecting against them.

> Those are totally impractical suggestions. The weirdos willing to tilt at windmills over this can have no noticeable effect.

That depends entirely on how many of them there are. How many will there be if people are propagandized into believing it can't be effective, vs. creating a culture in which refusal to countenance bullshit is a moral imperative?

It's okay to be the only person doing the right thing. Somebody has to be first. Don't make fun of them, don't tell them it's futile, join them and convince others to do so.

> Rooting a device takes a lot of work, if it's even possible at all. Volunteers just don't have the combination of skills and dedicated man-hours to make that a practical alternative across the consumer device space, except maybe in some unusual cases.

You only need one person to succeed. It's a fun and socially beneficial hobby, and has been successful across a range of consumer devices in the past.

> Competitive markets would fix this immediately...And the customers all have an incentive to choose the one that doesn't, putting any manufacturer willing to respect the customer at a competitive advantage.

No company wants that "advantage" because that would make them less money and give them much less power. If you sell a product and people are willing to pay X for it then you can make X (minus your costs), but if you can also collect and sell your customer's data you will make even more money on top of what you would have otherwise. Nobody is going to leave all of that money on the table.

Exploiting your customers also gives you power over them. You can remotely disable features your customers already paid for and force them to pay you over and over and over again to get them back. You can ensure that your product is only used in ways you approve of. You can change/censor your product at any time after it's sold. You can force customers to keep paying for the rest of their lives for a product they used to be able to get with a single payment of a set amount.

No company is going to give up all the extra money and power to "outcompete" their rivals. You can see that for yourself. Where are all the companies giving consumers what we want? If there's really an endless fortune to be made selling smart TVs that don't push ads or spy on users why aren't you personally working on doing just that already? It's guaranteed to make you rich beyond your wildest dreams when you drive every other TV company on Earth out of business right? Why hasn't someone done that already? Sometimes it will always be more profitable and advantageous for companies to refuse to give consumers what they want. I hope you're right someone does decide to make a massive fortune selling high quality smart TVs that don't exploit the customer, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for one.

> No company wants that "advantage" because that would make them less money and give them much less power.

If your company had 3% of the market and not screwing your customers would get you 10% of the market, you're now not only making more than three times as much revenue, you have that many more units to spread your fixed costs over.

That doesn't work when you have 40% of the market and not screwing your customers would get you 47% of the market, because the value of screwing your customers can easily be more than 20% but less than 300%. Which is why the screwing happens in uncompetitive markets but not competitive ones.

> Exploiting your customers also gives you power over them. You can remotely disable features your customers already paid for and force them to pay you over and over and over again to get them back. You can ensure that your product is only used in ways you approve of. You can change/censor your product at any time after it's sold. You can force customers to keep paying for the rest of their lives for a product they used to be able to get with a single payment of a set amount.

All of which customers hate.

Notice how "smart TVs" don't do most of these things. You buy the TV once and it keeps operating indefinitely. Why don't the most popular TVs require you to rent them for a monthly fee? Why isn't the monthly fee $1000/month? Because customers would buy from a competitor instead.

> If there's really an endless fortune to be made selling smart TVs that don't push ads or spy on users why aren't you personally working on doing just that already?

The spyware is already optional. Plenty of popular TVs work fine if you connect your own input to the HDMI port and never connect the TV to the internet. You can't get a competitive advantage just by offering the same feature unless the incumbents stop offering that feature, which they haven't, presumably because they know it would cost them sales.

> Notice how "smart TVs" don't do most of these things. You buy the TV once and it keeps operating indefinitely.

I haven't yet seen a TV company remotely brick their devices, or start demanding microtransactions for basic features but people are still paying for their TVs over and over and over again. You can't "buy the TV once" and be done, you're forced to give up your personal data and that never goes away and will be used against you. The company has a continuous revenue stream using and selling your data and it never ends. Every day you use the product you're paying.

> The spyware is already optional. Plenty of popular TVs work fine if you connect your own input to the HDMI port and never connect the TV to the internet.

Some TVs do allow you to keep them offline. Others will do everything they can to get online no matter what you do including actively scanning for open wifi networks and connecting to any it finds automatically.

Connecting input to the HDMI port isn't enough to save US though because TVs are pushing ads over that video too. If your TV overlays ads when the volume changes no matter what you're viewing it won't matter if you're playing a game or a DVD or streaming video from another device. As non-smart TVs get harder to find and ad pushing and data collection become more aggressive I hope someone does step forward to offer a real alternative that doesn't do those things. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I do though.

> You can't "buy the TV once" and be done, you're forced to give up your personal data and that never goes away and will be used against you.

How is it forcing you to do this if you never connect it to the internet?

> Some TVs do allow you to keep them offline. Others will do everything they can to get online no matter what you do including actively scanning for open wifi networks and connecting to any it finds automatically.

The obvious solution would be to buy the first kind, but even for the second, you can snip the antenna or use it somewhere there aren't any open Wi-Fi networks it can use.

> If your TV overlays ads when the volume changes no matter what you're viewing it won't matter if you're playing a game or a DVD or streaming video from another device.

How is it going to get any ads to show you without an internet connection?

> As non-smart TVs get harder to find and ad pushing and data collection become more aggressive I hope someone does step forward to offer a real alternative that doesn't do those things.

The device you're looking for is marketed as a "monitor" instead of a "TV" even though it's exactly the same thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com