I’ve spent some time thinking about privacy and LLMs. I developed the impression that encryption isn’t meaningful in this space. It seems like end to end encryption only truly works when both ends are outside of the system and can manage their keys independently of it. In this case one end is the system. My message has to be decrypted for processing by the LLM. So is “end to end encryption” in this case any different than HTTPS? It doesn’t seem like it
>You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.
I don't think LLMs really constitute a medium by McLuhan's definition. A medium is an extension of man, and LLMs don't extend so much as they replace. An LLM is closer to a secretary or similar force multiplier than an extension of oneself.
I think it absolutely is a medium based on his big picture idea of how the way we consume information influences us. A TV series or a web search or a university lecture or an evening in the stacks all deeply influence how we might study a subject and in what ways the facts take hold within us. An LLM query or “conversation” is a distinct sibling to those. And a secretary is a medium.
> You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.
What about ELIZA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
I’ve spent some time thinking about privacy and LLMs. I developed the impression that encryption isn’t meaningful in this space. It seems like end to end encryption only truly works when both ends are outside of the system and can manage their keys independently of it. In this case one end is the system. My message has to be decrypted for processing by the LLM. So is “end to end encryption” in this case any different than HTTPS? It doesn’t seem like it
>You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.
I don't think LLMs really constitute a medium by McLuhan's definition. A medium is an extension of man, and LLMs don't extend so much as they replace. An LLM is closer to a secretary or similar force multiplier than an extension of oneself.
I think it absolutely is a medium based on his big picture idea of how the way we consume information influences us. A TV series or a web search or a university lecture or an evening in the stacks all deeply influence how we might study a subject and in what ways the facts take hold within us. An LLM query or “conversation” is a distinct sibling to those. And a secretary is a medium.
I always said our data lake was frozen over. You could get tons of data into it, but barely anything back out.
That is literally the definition of a data lake. The one you can get anything back out of is called a database.