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I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

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Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#21

Post by sowbug »

roywiggins wrote: post #18
sowbug wrote: post #7

I wonder whether your individually trained chat bot will be allowed to assert the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to stop it from talking when the police interview it. And if it's allowed, do you or it decide whether whether to assert it? What if the two of you disagree? Similar questions for civil trials, divorce proceedings, child custody....

How could it have a right not to self-incriminate when it can't be tried for a crime? An AI can't be indicted or convicted. Humans can be required to testify too if they're immunized.

Apologies for the ambiguity. I imagine that my future AI-based "second brain" will be derived from my own brain, including its personality, memories, and preferences. Anyone in an adversarial position to me would be very interested in talking to it. I pose whether the term "self-incrimination" should include one's second brain as part of one's self. The question was not whether police would put a PC in jail.

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#23

Post by sowbug »

bbor wrote: post #20
sowbug wrote: post #7

I wonder whether your individually trained chat bot will be allowed to assert the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to stop it from talking when the police interview it. And if it's allowed, do you or it decide whether whether to assert it? What if the two of you disagree? Similar questions for civil trials, divorce proceedings, child custody....

Wait is this a serious concern or a joke? I think asking a chat bot whether it’s admissible is the same as asking someone’s handwritten diary if it’s admissible.

Fortunately, US courts take these sorts of questions quite seriously. See, e.g., State v. Smith (Ohio 2009): "Even the more basic models of modern cell phones are capable of storing a wealth of digitized information wholly unlike any physical object found within a closed container." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States is also a good read, as is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riley_v._California: "Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life". The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought."

If a cell phone is recognized as having a higher expectation of privacy than a mere passive document, then it stands to reason courts will also recognize a personalized machine that is even more earnest to help as my infernal "by the way..." Alexa home device.

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#24

Post by [deleted] »

sokoloff wrote: post #19
roywiggins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it have a right not to self-incriminate when it can't be tried for a crime? An AI can't be indicted or convicted. Humans can be required to testify too if they're immunized.

With limitations. I cannot be compelled to testify against my wife (and probably not against my kids, though I’m unsure of that [edit: that seems to vary by state currently]), even if I personally am granted immunity.

[deleted]

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#25

Post by trane_project »

I've been thinking of using GPT or similar LLMs to extract flashcards to use with my spaced repetition project (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/). As in you give it a book and it creates the flashcards for you and the dependencies between the lessons.

I played around with chatgpt and it worked pretty well. I have a lot of other things in my plate to get around first (including starting a math curriculum) but it's definitely an exciting direction.

I think LLMs and AI are not anywhere near actual intelligence (chatgpt can spout a lot of good sounding nonsense ATM), but the semantic analysis they can do is by itself very useful.

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#26

Post by dchuk »

leobg wrote: post #14

Slight overkill to use GPT, though it works for the author and I can see that it’s the low hanging fruit, being available as an API. But this can also be done locally, using SBERT, or even (faster, though less powerful) fastText. Also, it’s helpful not to cut paragraphs into separate pieces, but rather to use a sliding window approach, where each paragraph retains the context of what came before, and/or the breadcrum…

When using SBERT instead of gpt for this use case, is it paired with some sort of vector database or just all done in code/memory?

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#27

Post by pessimist »

michaericalribo wrote: post #5

These "augmented intelligence" applications are so exciting to me. I'm not as interested in autonomous artificial intelligence. Computers are tools to make my life easier, not meant to lead their own lives! There's a big up-front cost of building a notes database for this application, but it illustrates the point nicely: encode a bunch of data ("memories"), and use an AI like GPT to retrieve information ("remembering…

In chess we had a tiny window of a few years when humans could use the help of computers to play the world's best chess. By 2000, computers were far better than humans and the gap has increased. Chess players are now entertainers, like all us humans are destined to spend our time doing.

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#28

Post by leobg »

dchuk wrote: post #26
leobg wrote: post #14

Slight overkill to use GPT, though it works for the author and I can see that it’s the low hanging fruit, being available as an API. But this can also be done locally, using SBERT, or even (faster, though less powerful) fastText. Also, it’s helpful not to cut paragraphs into separate pieces, but rather to use a sliding window approach, where each paragraph retains the context of what came before, and/or the breadcrum…

When using SBERT instead of gpt for this use case, is it paired with some sort of vector database or just all done in code/memory?

You’d want persistence, since the embedding process takes some time. But you don’t need to go all Pinecone on this. There is FAISS, and there is hnswlib, for example. Like SQLite for vector search.

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#29

Post by leobg »

lpasselin wrote: post #6
sandkoan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd honestly argue that he might not have even needed OpenAI embeddings—any off-the-shelf Huggingface model would've sufficed. Because of attention mechanisms, we no longer so heavily depend on the existence of those "pointy words," so generally, Transformers-based semantic search works quite well.

I actually tried this last year, before OpenAI released their cheaper embeddings v2 in december. From my experiments, when compared to Bert embeddings (or recent variation of the model) the OpenAI embeddings are miles ahead when doing similarity search.

Interesting. Nils Reimers (SBERT guy) wrote on Medium that he found them to perform worse than SOTA models. Though that was, I believe, before December.

Re: I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system

#30

Post by rolenthedeep »

sowbug wrote: post #7

I wonder whether your individually trained chat bot will be allowed to assert the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to stop it from talking when the police interview it. And if it's allowed, do you or it decide whether whether to assert it? What if the two of you disagree? Similar questions for civil trials, divorce proceedings, child custody....

Think about what kinds of data an AI assistant would store about you vs what your phone stores.

Your phone is already more or less an extension of your brain, and whether or not you can be forced to unlock and surrender it for inspection is already a contentious topic.

IANAL, but phone privacy would probably set the precedent for AI assistant privacy.

Always keep your phone encrypted and be aware what your local laws are. Some places will force you to provide biometric authentication, but not provide a PIN or password. Check if your phone has a duress lockdown mode: some phones lock and/or wipe if you press the power button five times or something like that.

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