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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

#41

Post by pclmulqdq »

paxys wrote: post #25
BoxFour wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Speech-to-text has gone through courts before. It's not a new technology. You're out of luck on sneaking the use of speech-to-text in 2-party consent states.

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

#42

Post by HenryOsborn »

This was the inevitable endpoint of the current AI unit economics. When inference costs are this high and open-source models are compressing SaaS margins to zero, companies can't survive on standard subscription models. They have to subsidize the compute by monetizing the user's context window. The real liability isn't just ads; it's what happens when autonomous agents start making financial decisions influenced by sponsored retrieval data.

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

#43

Post by ramenbytes »

com2kid wrote: post #26
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…

> 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.

Those don't sound like things that you need AI for.

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

#44

Post by throwaway5465 »

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…

They seem quite honest with who they are and how they do what they do.

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

#45

Post by yndoendo »

BoxFour wrote: post #23
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.

A good example of this is what one of my family member's partner said. "Isn't creep that you just talked about something and now you are seeing ads for it. Guess we just have to accept it."

My response was no I don't get any of that because I disable that technology since it is always listening and can never be trusted. There is no privacy in those services.

They did not like that response.

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

#46

Post by nfgrep »

> There needs to be a business model based on selling the hardware and software, not the data the hardware collects. An architecture where the company that makes the device literally cannot access the data it processes, because there is no connection to access it through.

Genuine Q: Is this business model still feasible? Its hard to imagine anyone other than apple sustaining a business off of hardware; they have the power to spit out full hardware refreshes every year. How do you keep a team of devs alive on the seemingly one-and-done cash influx of first-time-buyers?

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

#47

Post by luxuryballs »

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…

I wonder if the answer is that it is stored and processes in a way that a human can’t access or read, like somehow it’s encrypted and unreadable but tokenized and can be processed, I don’t know how but it feels possible.

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

#48

Post by 1over137 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #41
paxys wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Speech-to-text has gone through courts before. It's not a new technology. You're out of luck on sneaking the use of speech-to-text in 2-party consent states.

Of course it's new! Now it's "AI"! /s

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

#50

Post by notatoad »

doomslayer999 wrote: post #12

Who would buy OpenAI's spy device? I think a lot of public discourse and backlash about the greedy, anticompetitive, and exploitative practices of the silicon valley elite have gone mainstream and will hopefully course correct the industry in time.

i'm continually surprised by how many people will buy and wear meta's AI spy sunglasses.

if there's a market for a face camera that sends everything you see to meta, there's probably a market for whatever device openAI launches.

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