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Comment by nozzlegear | Hacker News Reader

Boardrooms don't typically make mundane purchasing decisions like "which AI vendor should we use."

The boardroom will absolutely veto a decision like "let's give all of our proprietary data way to a company that will use it to train a competing product". That's why zero data retention exists, and why it's corporate suicide to not do it correctly.

Normally I'd agree, but I can't see how OpenAI has proven trustworthy at this point. How do you know they are doing it correctly? How do you know their models aren't escaping containment and training on your shit? What is it about OpenAI's operational security up to this point that has bestowed any confidence to anyone?

If the news broke tomorrow that their internal, Navier-Stokes-defeating models had actually used those private tokens, I'm sure we'd all act surprised and outraged – it'd be an egregious violation of their agreements. But would it actually be that surprising given their recent history?

Nothing is certain in life, but huge corporations very rarely engage in flagrant, intentional breach of contract at all, and particularly not with counterparties who have good alternatives available. If OpenAI turned out to be training on ZDR queries, they would as a practical matter have to retrain their models from the ground up on uncontaminated data (which would cost 9 or 10 figures), possibly pay considerable damages to counterparties, and offer a detailed accounting of what went wrong and probably fire a bunch of senior leaders.

Many companies are choosing not to send any sensitive data to any ai vendor. They don't really trust they won't train on user data.

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