I have not been writing anything for my blog for quite a while. The main reason was me waiting to see how the AI (LLM) situation develops. In short, I did not feel compelled to write any publicly available texts, knowing that they will be scrapped and used to train the next LLM.
Just a few years ago I was working for a startup with a great product. We knew that the AI will be hungry for data but that most of the data is not made available by the legal restrictions. So we create a framework using Secure Multi-Party Computations to enable the AL/ML models to be trained on the data without them ever seeing the data. It worked, but the startup was having troubles attracting customers. The customer would be someone with ambitions to train a large model on a large set of data.
Then the OpenAI guys came out with their ChatGPT trained on all the data they did not have access to. Turns out, the big guys with ambitions were not interested in paying a bit to a tech startup. They reasoned it would be simpler to just pay a lot to lawyers instead. So instead of using a technical solution to a problem, they just used a human versions of it. Do the wrong thing and then pay the lawyers to defend it.
By now it is clear that it worked. OpenAI valuation is high, court cases dropped, other big guys doing the same thing. Lawyers happy, our little startup left out in the dust.
Of course this left me a little bit sour. I think training LLMs is a good development and they are a great tool. I am just sad it was done in such a crooked way.
The experience of having a great product for a market, and yet still failing due to the big guys on the market cheating, made me more of a cynic. I will no longer be contributing to OpenSource much and will make other adjustments. I will no longer favour cooperation over competition. I am going to remain on the "good" side of the history, of course. And I will be helping the people around me - the family, the team and the community.
It is too early to tell how much the AI/LLM is going to change the world yet, but it has changed me.