So Google uses something called “federated learning” which is not as fun as it sounds. It’s where they load a small model onto your device, train it on all your data, then send the resulting training data back to headquarters.
So it’s totally cool! Because your actual PII never leaves your device! Just everything about you statistically that might be useful to advertisers or governments! Really, whoever can pay!
I’m convinced (and would place money on) the mechanism for LLMS to start self propagating and maliciously wreck all internet connected devices (read: Our entire society) is via companies trying to offload compute via something very similar to federated learning.
Just put a teeny model on everyone’s device and let it adapt to the user needs and oops skynet
That would indeed suck. Very paperclip maximising. Doesn’t even have to be malicious, really.
But yeah I was just reading about yet another critical CVE this morning. The third this week. And wondered to myself if I was seeing the end of the open internet.
Like will there be a day where it simply isn’t safe to leave a device just passively connected to the internet or any broadly distributed network? Like I’m behind two firewalls at work, surrounded by highly capable network and cybersecurity PhDs and still one of our systems got low-key pwned just this month.
So Google uses something called “federated learning” which is not as fun as it sounds. It’s where they load a small model onto your device, train it on all your data, then send the resulting training data back to headquarters.
So it’s totally cool! Because your actual PII never leaves your device! Just everything about you statistically that might be useful to advertisers or governments! Really, whoever can pay!
I’m convinced (and would place money on) the mechanism for LLMS to start self propagating and maliciously wreck all internet connected devices (read: Our entire society) is via companies trying to offload compute via something very similar to federated learning.
Just put a teeny model on everyone’s device and let it adapt to the user needs and oops skynet
That would indeed suck. Very paperclip maximising. Doesn’t even have to be malicious, really.
But yeah I was just reading about yet another critical CVE this morning. The third this week. And wondered to myself if I was seeing the end of the open internet.
Like will there be a day where it simply isn’t safe to leave a device just passively connected to the internet or any broadly distributed network? Like I’m behind two firewalls at work, surrounded by highly capable network and cybersecurity PhDs and still one of our systems got low-key pwned just this month.