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Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

juno-labs.com

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Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#21

Post by ajuhasz »

paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later?

One of our core architecture decisions was to use a streaming speech-to-text model. At any given time about 80ms of actual audio is in memory and about 5 minutes of transcribed audio (text) is in memory (this is help the STT model know the context of the audio for higher transcription accuracy).

Of these 5 minute transcripts, those that don't become memories are forgotten. So only selected extracted memories are durably stored. Currently we store the transcript with the memory (this was a request from our prototype users to help them build confidence in the transcription accuracy) but we'll continue to iterate based on feedback if this is the correct decision.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#22

Post by BoxFour »

zmmmmm wrote: post #19

It's interesting to me that there seems to be an implicit line being drawn around what's acceptable and what's not between video and audio. If there's a camera in an AI device (like Meta Ray Ban glasses) then there's a light when it's on, and they are going out of their way to engineer it to be tamper resistant. But audio - this seems to be on the other side of the line. Passively listening ambient audio is being tre…

> Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent

That’s not accurate. There are plenty of states that require everyone involved to consent to a recording of a private conversation. California, for example.

Voice assistants today skirt around that because of the wake word, but always-on recording obviously negates that defense.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#23

Post by BoxFour »

paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

It’s definitely a strange pitch, because the target audience (the privacy-conscious crowd) is exactly the type who will immediately spot all the issues you just mentioned. It's difficult to think of any privacy-conscious individual who wouldn't want, at bare minimum, a wake word (and more likely just wouldn't use anything like this period).

The non privacy-conscious will just use Google/etc.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#24

Post by ajuhasz »

zmmmmm wrote: post #20
paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to exist in…

Agreed, while we've tried to think through this and build in protections we can't pretend that there is a magical perfect solution. We do have strong conviction that doing this inside the walls of your home is much safer than doing it within any companies datacenter (I accept that some just don't want this to exist period and we won't be able to appease them).

Some of our decisions in this direction:

  - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory
  - Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on the side of forgetting (https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen)
  - Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM)
We're always open to criticism on how to improve our implementation around this.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#25

Post by paxys »

BoxFour wrote: post #22
zmmmmm wrote: post #19

It's interesting to me that there seems to be an implicit line being drawn around what's acceptable and what's not between video and audio. If there's a camera in an AI device (like Meta Ray Ban glasses) then there's a light when it's on, and they are going out of their way to engineer it to be tamper resistant. But audio - this seems to be on the other side of the line. Passively listening ambient audio is being tre…

> Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent That’s not accurate. There are plenty of states that require everyone involved to consent to a recording of a private conversation. California, for example. Voice assistants today skirt around that because of the wake word, but always-on recording obviously negates that defense.

AI "recording" software has never been tested in court, so no one can say what the legality is. If we are having a conversation (in a two party consent state) and a secret AI in my pocket generates a text transcript of it in real time without storing the audio, is that illegal? What about if it just generates a summary? What about if it is just a list of TODOs that came out of the conversation?

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#26

Post by com2kid »

paxys wrote: post #16

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company ( https://juno-labs.com/ ) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (inc…

> Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later?

Typically not how these things work. Speech is processed using ASR (automatic speech recognition), and then ran through a prompt that checks for appropriate tools calls.

I've been meaning to basically make this myself but I've been too lazy lately to bother.

I actually want a lot more functionality from a local only AI machine, I believe the paradigm is absurdly powerful.

Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then moving they browser window to a different tab.

Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about.

I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#27

Post by com2kid »

ajuhasz wrote: post #17
BoxFour wrote: post #14

This strikes me as a pretty weak rationalization for "safe" always-on assistants. Even if the model runs locally, there’s still a serious privacy issue: Unwitting victims of something recording everything they said. Friends at your house who value their privacy probably won’t feel great knowing you’ve potentially got a transcript of things they said just because they were in the room. Sure, it's still better than als…

We give an overview of our the current memory architecture at https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on... This is something we call out under the "What we got wrong" section. We're currently collecting an audio dataset that should help create a speech-to-text (STT) model that incorporates speaker identification and that tag will be weaved into the core of the memory architecture. > The shared hous…

Heyas! Glad to see someone making this

I wrote a blog post about this exact product space a year ago. https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...

I hope y'all succeed! The potential use cases for locally hosted AI dwarf what can be done with SaSS.

I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#28

Post by ajuhasz »

com2kid wrote: post #27
ajuhasz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We give an overview of our the current memory architecture at https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on... This is something we call out under the "What we got wrong" section. We're currently collecting an audio dataset that should help create a speech-to-text (STT) model that incorporates speaker identification and that tag will be weaved into the core of the memory architecture. > The shared hous…

Heyas! Glad to see someone making this I wrote a blog post about this exact product space a year ago. https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-... I hope y'all succeed! The potential use cases for locally hosted AI dwarf what can be done with SaSS. I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.

Yes! We see a lot of the same things that really should have been solved by the first wave of assistants. Your _Around The House_ reads similar to a lot of our goals though we would love the system to be much more pro-active than current assistants.

Feel free to reach out. Would love to swap notes and send you a prototype.

> I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.

Oh man, we've had to really track our bill of materials (BOM) and average selling price (ASP) estimates to make sure everything stays feasible. Thankfully these models quantize well and the size-to-intelligence frontier is moving out all the time.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#29

Post by rimbo789 »

piekvorst wrote: post #5
rimbo789 wrote: post #3

Ads in AI should be banned right now. We need to learn from mistakes of the internet (crypto, facebook) and aggressively regulate early and often before this gets too institutionalized to remove.

Ads (at least in the classical pre-AI sense) are by orders of magnitude better than preventive laws

I trust corporations far far far less than government or lawmakers (who I also don’t trust). I know corporations will use ads in the most manipulative and destructive manner. Laws may be flawed but are worth the risk.

Re: Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

#30

Post by popalchemist »

ajuhasz wrote: post #7
sxp wrote: post #4

The article is forgetting about Anthropic which currently has the best agentic programmer and was the backbone for the recent OpenClaw assistants.

True, we focused on hardware embodied AI assistants (smart speakers, smart glasses, etc) as those are the ones we believe will soon start leaving wake words behind and moving towards an always-on interaction design. The privacy implications of an always-listening smart speaker are magnitudes higher than OpenClaw that you intentionally interact with.

Both are pandoras box. Open Claw has access to your credit cards, social media accounts, etc by default (i.e. if you have them saved in your browser on the account that Open Claw runs on, which most people do.)
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