[HN Gopher] Dropbox spooks users by sending data to OpenAI for A...
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       Dropbox spooks users by sending data to OpenAI for AI search
       features
        
       Author : arunbahl
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2023-12-13 21:57 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
        
       | millzlane wrote:
       | Is there any recourse for users?
        
       | metadat wrote:
       | Existing front page discussion from today:
       | 
       |  _Dropbox: How to opt out of 3rd party AI partner access to your
       | Dropbox_
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38629963 (124 comments)
        
       | jay_kyburz wrote:
       | It's weird that Dropbox would want to pay Open AI to do whatever
       | it is they are doing on everyone's files, without knowing if a
       | use will ever use or see that feature. It sounds like a premium
       | feature that you would want a user to have to manually enable.
        
         | hungrigekatze wrote:
         | I have no doubt that this "feature" is a backroom deal worth
         | millions because OpenAI is running out of public internet data
         | with which to improve its models. (See this paper from
         | researchers at MIT and a few other schools which predicts that
         | high-quality text training data will be 'used up' by 2026:
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04325 )
         | 
         | Think of all of the email, Google Docs, and other data that
         | Alphabet has that it can use to train and improve its models.
         | OpenAI has limited ways to get non-public text data unless
         | Microsoft is giving them some data from Office users, Hotmail
         | users.
         | 
         | Just my two cents. And whatever Dropbox is doing with retrieval
         | augmented generation (RAG) / "new+better search" with the
         | OpenAI APIs: I'm certain it could be done with less latency and
         | probably would cost less if the RAG 'feature' / 'new search'
         | was built in house at Dropbox.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-13 23:01 UTC)