Model drift vs. predicting stonks from Federal Reserve minutes

The artificial intelligence future-world we are all imagining in the wake of LLMs like Chat GPT will not be as shiny as many imagine, nor as apocalyptic, because the more real the hype turns out to be, the more it will undermine broader social institutions it needs in order to make sense. You will definitely still have a job and while you may want to put some kind of future prompt engineering skill on your resume, it will probably be a virtue you possess today that gets you over the line and onto the payroll.

In making this point I touch on things like...

  • the 2006 classic Beerfest

  • moral crises of garbage information like QAnon

  • reading Federal Reserve minutes quickly to interpret stock movements

  • the "beauty mark" as a profound quirk of human cognition

My main argument, once again, is that model drift will be a severe problem for these technologies long-term.

How to cope with the AI revolution that isn't coming how you think

I will tell you the right things about how to cope with the artificial intelligence revolution that isn't coming in exchange for your ears regarding the privacy revolution that can and should be. I also touch on topics like...

  • impostor syndrome

  • market power in big tech

  • the tight incestuous circle of power that is the apex of Silicon Valley

  • good old fashioned subconsciously dumping your pain and fear on others

If you are still reading, good job! Your reward is that the end of the story is that you should try to make a friend and read a book today. It was good advice yesterday and Chat GPT will help make it better advice tomorrow.

A painful legal either / or around ChatGPT and generative AI in general

Artificial intelligence models that require huge and diverse datasets to train, like ChatGPT for example, seem poised to place their creators between the proverbial rock-and-a-hard-place regarding a couple of important legal issues. On the one hand, it is very imaginable sooner or later someone sues because of bad AI advice, and in that situation it would be great to invoke something like Section 230 and claim the fault lies with the training data you got from someone else over the internet. But then... people have already sued because they feel like their intellectual property was infringed by the training process, and in this situation the OpenAI's and Google's of the world would love to claim the AI's output is original work that they own. These are unpleasantly contradictory stances...

The newspaper is 100% pandemic hangovers

I was browsing the "LinkedIn News" and it seems like basically everything we discuss these days is really a lingering legacy of pandemic somehow. I cover some of the basic, and very extreme, macroeconomics of the lockdown phase before examining Big Tech layoffs, the strength of the more blue-collar labor market sector, who is and isn't working at all, banking crises, housing speculation, and (most importantly) the significance of who is paying how much for what part of the chicken.

Legal wrangling in the ongoing DeSantis v. Disney confrontation

Check out my update on the recent Disney vs. DeSantis feud regarding the Disney's past and maybe future self-governing district around their amusement park in Florida. I cover the last minute and sneaky but also embarrassingly broad-daylight contracts that may allow Disney to maintain control in all but name, a semi-arcane but important legal rule called the "rule against perpetuities" that has people asking "Why King Charles?", and speculate on the optics of what will happen with the dispute going forward.

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Controveries regarding ChatGPT creator OpeanAI

If large language models like ChatGPT even halfway fulfill their current hype, the people that build them will acquire a level of control over how we consume information that will make us long for the days when we were just freaked out about Google and Facebook. Thus, it is important to understand the institutions that build and control them. In this video, I will cover some controversies about OpenAI including their awkward combo for-profit and not-for-profit status, why Elon Musk is salty with them, whether telling people they can "only" get 9900% returns on investment makes sense, and finally I beg the legal community to help me figure out why I feel so sketchy about their governance situation.

In praise of middle management

Out my eyes, in both my lived experiences and anything I ever read that I thought was even semi-relevant, middle management is actually the layer that most determines a good and bad outcome. I perceive not a whole lot of people share this view and I would like to persuade you. I hope you believe me I could tell a lot of stories from my own career, but to keep things on neutral ground I give a number of examples from military history you can read about in a book and that I think tell a story very relevant to large corporations.

Data sovereignty explored via TikTok, China, and a Dutch class-action lawsuit

If you ask me, data sovereignty may turn out to be the real exciting 21st century data business headache. I examine these issues via current controversy involving TikTok and Bytedance, the (mostly unsung) broader history of similar conflicts with China with roles both the same and reversed, and also the actually very similar issues with Meta and Facebook in Europe explored via a recent Dutch class-action privacy lawsuit.

Meta and Twitter's paid security vs. long term trends

I try to think a bit ahead about data. Question: What will the consumer privacy and cybersecurity landscape be like when the first generations of internet companies possibly start to fall behind the curve? It is easy to imagine Big Tech will be "big" forever, but these companies are actually demonstrative of a long-term trend in the United States where corporations grow large more quickly and then also shrink and die more quickly than in the past. In this video I discuss these broad trends, what I think they might mean for technology long-term, and go into some specific, illuminating examples where social media companies like Twitter and Meta have added security features in paid tiers... because they are ostensibly struggling with cash flow and lack of investor interest in a new way.

Important technology for right now

WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!

I'd like to eventually convince you that #PrivacyEnhancingTechnologies (or P.E.T.s) might represent money on the table for your organization and you should look into developing competency with them. In this video, via a demonstration of our #Python SDK Ghost PII, I make some important points towards this end. Specifically, this technology is not science fiction and not something you need to be a genius to use. It is something that is ready to go right now, can be made very seamless and easy to use (and we have!), and the performance is pretty damn good. #CyberSecurity #DataPrivacy #ArtificialIntelligence #DataScience

LIVE from Madison Square Garden: creepy facial recognition, no beer, and no lawyers.

#MadisonSquareGarden is using #FacialRecognition tech to kick out lawyers that work for firms it is seeing in court. I discussed a specific incident in a past video, but this has apparently become common practice and the topic of a public kerfuffle. I cover some of the interesting details like how apparently this practice can only be continued legally if the venue stops serving #beer at hockey games and how apparently owner James Dolan is threatening to do just this in order to continue his blacklist.

#ArtificialIntelligence #DataPrivacy

"Cheetah" Performance Upgrades to GhostPII

NEW RELEASE: Take a moment to get the detail on our extremely sexy new release of Ghost PII improvements.

Dubbed "Cheetah" it includes a variety of world-class performance improvements - the real action is deep in the back-end, but the benefits for applications like encrypted search and machine learning are tangible and substantial. Private computation needs to be something everyday people can use and this includes the ability to build familiar models at scale on a timeline that fits into your day.

Cheetah is going to take good care of you in a way you may not be able to find elsewhere.

#ArtificialIntelligence #Python #Privacy #CyberSecurity

Facial recognition nightmares...

#FacialRecognition technology keeps coming up in the news as an #ArtificialIntelligence technology that seems to generate especially nightmarish #DataPrivacy issues (and maybe just general nightmares). In this video I tell the story of a woman trying to attend a show with her daughter's Girl Scout troop before being instantly singled out by security and ejected... because she worked for a law firm that was involved in litigation against the venue owner. She got to cool her heels outside waiting out the show, separated from her daughter. Oof...

FTX looking forward: Possible clawbacks and consequences

In many ways #FTX appears to be a very classic sort of scam writ large. In this video, I will talk a bit about what history tells us to expect going forward from here. I think the possibility of #LawEnforcement clawbacks of money spent by #SBF are particularly fascinating here given how freely he spent and into the pockets of so many influential people. I give some sketch about what might happen and talk a bit about some other clawbacks of history including the fallout from #BernieMadoff's charitable giving being clawed back to compensate victims.

Meta's fine, the special role of Ireland, and scraping as breach

The #DataPrivacy regulator in #Ireland recently fined #Meta, parent company of #Facebook, $275 million for a breach last year. In this video I elaborate on a couple weird situations embodied in this event including the awkward role that Ireland plays enforcing #GDPR disproportionately for #Europe as a whole and then also the legal haze regarding when letting people scrape your website too easily should be called a #DataBreach.

Litecoin as a privacy coin - How is it going?

#Crypto will likely find itself at the crossroads following the #FTX collapse so I thought it would be a good time to revisit the world of #privacy coins, #Litecoin especially, and check in on how some of the themes discussed in my past videos have played out. To recap, #Litecoin is an old #Bitcoin clone than recently adopted sexy new privacy features to differentiate itself. You can see the cons have played out to a small degree, with two small exchanges in South Korea de-listing it for #AntiMoneyLaundering concerns, but also maybe some signs of the pros in that the forward look around privacy has helped feed perceptions that Litecoin is a "good" project worthy of surviving crypto winter.

Basic ideas of multi-party computation

THE MINI-SERIES CONTINUES: multi-party computation edition.

I focus primarily on defining and motivating multi-party computation but I also outline a bit some of my remaining topics like federated learning and zero-knowledge proof. I will be starting to emphasize a little more the boundaries between these ideas (or not) and tell you a bit more of the big story about the big shared ideas.