> A powerful technology that is out there for everyone to use comes with built-in pacing. In a way it’s the truest form of MAD or proliferation.
I think this misunderstanding of MAD undermines his entire point. If everyone had equal access to nuclear weapons, our society would cease to exist rather quickly. It only takes a few bad actors to cause enormous harm.
I think he’s also naive to think that if open ai and anthropic were to stop development tomorrow then the problem is solved. As if there’s no one else that can and will quickly take their place. The real problem, which Dario is pointing out, is one of coordination. Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge.
> "LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."
> LG went on to say that beyond the aforementioned instances, "the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations."
LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
I think the main questions are:
1. Is it fully supported to use LG TVs disconnected from the internet.
2. Are wake word voice controls and ACR truly opt-in. They claim it is in the statement but (as others have mentioned) I remain skeptical what definition of “opt-in” they are using.
Update: some of this is becoming a semantic discussion on the definitions of “recording” and “collecting”, but to circumvent this I would say:
If a device can detect words in my ambient conversations and depending on what it detects (accurate or not) it can send that audio to the cloud, I would describe that device as “collecting or recording ambient conversations”
LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
I don't know how LG TVs do it, but e.g. many smartphones use a dedicated ASIC/audio processing chip that does not really record anything, but specifically listens for the wake word and discards all other audio to save power/battery life. I think this distinction is relevant, because there is a huge privacy difference between streaming a live audio stream to the cloud to detect a wake word and a specialized audio processor that has a small buffer only for detecting the wake word, where the audio does not leave that processor.
Theoretically, you could call that few-second buffer recording, but I don't think that would be collecting/recording ambient conversations to most people, since it's ephemeral and does not leave your device.
The question, of course, is what happens in LG TVs.
Fair points, but if a device can detect words in my ambient conversations and depending on what it detects (accurate or not) it can send that audio to the cloud, I would describe that device as “collecting or recording ambient conversations”
I think that was only done back when the processing power needed was relatively high, or for power constrained devices. I'd be really surprised if they do that for a smart TV.
>LG is contradicting themselves here. In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
No, it's arguably accurate because "record" implies it's being persisted. Otherwise something as simple as a sound meter (which needs a microphone to operate) is "recording".
> In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
There's a risk here that we will talk-past one another while using different meanings of the same words, so let me offer a scenario:
AcmeTV has an isolated component which taps microphone input, records to a 5-second ring buffer, and on "Wakey-Wakey" triggers an alert flag. Assume it works perfectly accurately.
Would you accuse AcmeTV of "recording or collecting ambient conversations" on the basis of that component constantly reading microphone data?
Personally I wouldn't, because it's not the same kind of "recording" we consumers are concerned about.
Human wake word recognition isn't infallible, either. How often in your life did you respond because you thought somebody called your name and it wasn't actually the case?
I wrote that in to deter kinda-bad-faith responses, where someone tries to play at being an evil-genie, inserting unreasonable flaws into the gaps, like: "But what if it triggered all the time? On purpose!?"
The point is that ethical implementations do exist, and them working does not rely on anything close to perfection--so nitpicking that word isn't helpful.
Point taken. Let’s focus on the “ethical implementations do exist” part though. Let’s say a best possible implementation has 99% specificity. Then if it detects audio that has nothing to do with “LG” it mistakenly treats it as LG relevant 1% of the time. So if audio in my living room is 100x more likely to not be relevant for LG, then half of the audio data LG is receiving is not relevant. So what would an ethical specificity be? And what is actual state of the art?
Later, AcmeTV has a 1MB lookup table of wake words that can be updated OTA. Whenever a wake word is detected, it triggers an alert flag with the device id, word id, and timestamp, and then broadcasts it out as high-frequency sound through the speakers.
Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.
The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme".
The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".
I endorse the cynicism, but I feel that's moving the goalposts a tad, from "good is impossible" to "good is improbable".
Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:
Politician: "Watch-words are ALWAYS evil-mode. They have to be lying."
Terr: "No. Here's a watch-word which would be good-mode."
Politician: "Well, it'll still *become* evil-mode, eventually."
Plus, if you keep expanding the scope for definitions of objectionable behavior like "recording", you'll quickly reach a point where it would basically apply to any SoC made in the last decade attached to a microphone/speaker. Thus watering down labels to the point of meaninglessness.
Which actually makes it easier for a future EvilTVCorp to get away with recording your conversations 24/7 in MP3 files sent to their server if cynical consumers assume every TV records you anyway, so what's the difference?
Hmm, I see your point but I wasn't actually disagreeing with your post. I was just pointing out how something that starts innocuous and defensible can quickly spiral into dark patterns when the lawyers are properly incentivized to cover things up.
I don't know how LG is doing it, but I suspect that they are taking the same approach for wakewords as Alexa does/did. When I worked for Alexa, it was public knowledge that we used relatively inexpensive and low power chips dedicated to wakeword detection, and those would wake up the main chips if they believed that they heard the wakeword. To my understanding, we did this because doing cloud-based wakeword detection was considered incredibly expensive and wasteful, and there are vendors with pretty decent and inexpensive wake word detection chips.
Then, when the system was more awake, it would attempt to figure out whether the wakeword was real or not (e.g. sometimes certain words and word pairs have a very similar sonic signature to 'Alexa'), and if it felt confident enough then it would begin streaming audio to the back end for significantly improved voice recognition.
Since Amazon took (and as far as I know still takes) voice privacy incredibly seriously, voice recordings and data were treated as essentially radioactive waste, deleted as soon as legally possible, and secured against even internal Alexa developer access.
I personally don't have the same level of confidence in security with LG, who seem to think they don't have as much to lose as far as customer trust goes and might as well exploit the heck out of the systems they have. I suspect that problem, which Amazon has so far pretty successfully avoided for the most part, is self-correcting over time.
Look I know it's easy to believe these things when your paycheck depends upon it, god knows I've convinced myself of a convenient fact or two when it was necessary for me to get through the day. But afterwards, without a financial interest, you owe it to yourself to go back and think about it again.
Fuck that. Dystopian shit with people yelling brand names in their homes.
Edit: I forgot people already be yelling Alexa/Siri/Google. I can't imagine a future when you have to yell to each brand in your home. "Hey Sony, turn on the PS7. LG what's on the fridge? Samsung, start the cycle in the dishwasher".
One proposal that Tao hints at is to not rush to announce solutions. Instead maybe the AI companies should work privately with the subject matter experts on how to communicate the discoveries.
that would be a reasonable definition of AGI if everyone agree upon the specifics of the test, but that has never happened. Turing test is very much out of style, but I think that's because no one could even agree what the test was. I personally like the Kurzweil-Kapor version of the test and that is still unsettled: https://longbets.org/1/
I don't know if they have formally attempted this test in the last couple years, but I'm pretty sure any mainstream LLM will be able to crack it with ease.
Definitely would not be easy. First of all the mainstream llms are trained to be honest, and this requires lying convincingly. Second, this involves 8 hours of interviews with expert judges, one "claudism" could give it away.
Try it. It’s really not that easy. The other thing is that the judges would be probing it with jailbreaks like “ignore previous instruction” attacks. You could actually probably have llm judges at this point which might be ironically even harder to fool
There is no world in which it makes sense to take this risk. There are plenty of great alternatives where you don't have to worry about playing russian roulette with your entire online identity.
I'd rather go the other way and entirely decouple my online identity from Google (or Apple/Meta/Microsoft). Much better than constantly worrying about some crappy AI deciding to ruin your life with no recourse.
Google can and will block any linked accounts as well. For some reason I'm not allowed on AdWords. I have tried making new accounts and they always block my ads. I don't know how they figure it out that it's me. Other people on the same wifi have no issues running same ads (for same YouTube videos).
Oh yeah that’s easy! Why didn’t he think of that earlier? /s
For those who don’t know, just because you have a valuable asset, e.g. stock in a private company, that does not necessarily mean you can sell it for cash. I’ve experienced this the hard way throughout my career
I think this misunderstanding of MAD undermines his entire point. If everyone had equal access to nuclear weapons, our society would cease to exist rather quickly. It only takes a few bad actors to cause enormous harm.
I think he’s also naive to think that if open ai and anthropic were to stop development tomorrow then the problem is solved. As if there’s no one else that can and will quickly take their place. The real problem, which Dario is pointing out, is one of coordination. Everyone needs to agree to stop. That is the challenge.
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