“Oh but they only run on local hardware…”
Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI.
Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later?
Have all your guests consented to this?
What happens when someone breaks in and steals the box?
What if the government wants to take a look at the data in there and serves a warrant?
What if a large company comes knocking and makes an acquistion offer? Will all the privacy guarantees still stand in face of the $$$ ?
I do sometimes wish it would be seen as an enlightened policy to legislate that personal private information held in technical devices is legally treated the same as information held in your brain. Especially for people for whom assistive technology is essential (deaf, blind, etc). But everything we see says the wind is blowing the opposite way.
Some of our decisions in this direction:
- Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory
- Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on the side of forgetting (https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen)
- Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM)
In the US you it is not legal to be compelled to turn over a password. It's a violation of your fifth amendment rights. In the UK you can be jailed until you turn over the password.
I'm being a bit flippant here, but thermite typically works fine.
Is this somehow fundamentally different from having memories?
Because I thought about it, and decided that personally I do - with one important condition, though. I do because my memories are not as great as I would like them to be, and they decline with stress and age. If a machine can supplement that in the same way my glasses supplement my vision, or my friend's hearing aid supplements his hearing - that'd be nice. That's why we have technology in the first place, to improve our lives, right?
But, as I said, there is an important condition. Today, what's in my head stays in there, and is only directly available to me. The machine-assisted memory aid must provide the same guarantees. If any information leaves the device without my direct instruction - that's a hard "no". If someone with physical access to the device can extract the information without a lot of effort - that's also a hard "no". If someone can too easily impersonate myself to the device and improperly gain access - that's another "no". Maybe there are a few more criteria, but I hope you got the overall idea.
If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot violate others' privacy - no more than I can do myself. And then - yeah - I want it, wish there'd be something like that.
No, we have technology to show you more and more ads, sell you more and more useless crap, and push your opinions on Important Matters toward the state approved ones.
Of course indoor plumbing, farming, metallurgy and printing were great hits, but technology has had a bit of a dry spell lately.
If "An always-on AI that listens to your household" doesn't make you recoil in horror, you need to pause and rethink your life.
AI feels more like an organized sniffing tool here.
> If a product passes those criteria, then it - by design - cannot violate others' privacy
A product can most assuredly violate privacy. Just look how Facebook gathered offline data to interconnect people to reallife data points, without their consent - and without them knowing. That's why I call it Spybook.
Ever since the USA became hostile to Canadians and Europeans this has also become much easier to deal with anyway - no more data is to be given to US companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious
https://www.mathfiction.net/files/Mathfiction%20-%20Borges%2...
The non privacy-conscious will just use Google/etc.
My response was no I don't get any of that because I disable that technology since it is always listening and can never be trusted. There is no privacy in those services.
They did not like that response.
Typically not how these things work. Speech is processed using ASR (automatic speech recognition), and then ran through a prompt that checks for appropriate tools calls.
I've been meaning to basically make this myself but I've been too lazy lately to bother.
I actually want a lot more functionality from a local only AI machine, I believe the paradigm is absurdly powerful.
Imagine an AI reminding you that you've been on HN too long and offering to save off the comment your working on for later and then moving they browser window to a different tab.
Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about.
I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing.
> Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about.
> I understand for people who aren't neurodiverse that the idea of just forgetting to do something that is incredibly critical to ones health and well-being isn't something that happens (often) but for plenty of other people a device that just helps people remember important things can be dramatically life changing.
Those don't sound like things that you need AI for.
> Having idle thoughts in the car of things you need to do and being able to just say them out loud and know important topics won't be forgotten about.
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything there that said it saved conversations. It sounds like it processes them as they happen and then takes actions that it thinks will help you achieve whatever goals of your it can infer from the conversation.
My problem is Siri doesn't do any of this stuff well. I'd really love to just get it out of the way so someone can build it better.
I love smart gadgets. I really wanted to go all in and automate my life, and the whole 'personal data' thing seemed like a really fair trade off for what was promised.
Only, they took all the data and never really delivered the convenience.
I spent about 10 years trying to figure out why WearOS needed to collect all my data, all the time, even when I wasn't wearing a watch, and yet when it crashed every few weeks, there was no way to restore anything from a backup. Had to start again from scratch every time (or ADB). What's the point in collecting all that data when I couldn't usefully access any of it?
Same thing with Google home, more or less. I wasn't a big fan of the terms and conditions, but hey, it's super convenient just being able to announce 'ok Google I need to get out of bed soon' and have it turn on the lights, play music etc.
Only, some mornings it wouldn't do that. Wouldn't even remember that I'd set an alarm. And alarms kinda need to be reliable: if they work 19 times out of 20, that's not actually good enough to rely on. Dumb alarm clocks, or phones, you can be pretty sure the alarm will go off So, not much point using Google for morning routines and alarms. So, not much point giving it full access to everything I say any time.
I would give it all my data if it could reliably remember to play preset alarms, or give a basic backup and restore option. Hell, I'd probably give Google access to all my photos if the UI wasn't so ugly.
I still don't really understand big techs reasoning here. If data is the new gold and everyone was dying for more ways to track odds us all and harvest our data - why not just build a decent product? If phone batteries lasted for days, people would spend more time on their phones, isn't that what the tech companies want? If competent people worked on making Gmail efficient, light, user friendly, and not crawling with bugs more people would use it, and more data.
It's like the oligarchs trying to take over the world will do literally anything, anything to win, other than paying people to develop decent, reliable products
One of our core architecture decisions was to use a streaming speech-to-text model. At any given time about 80ms of actual audio is in memory and about 5 minutes of transcribed audio (text) is in memory (this is help the STT model know the context of the audio for higher transcription accuracy).
Of these 5 minute transcripts, those that don't become memories are forgotten. So only selected extracted memories are durably stored. Currently we store the transcript with the memory (this was a request from our prototype users to help them build confidence in the transcription accuracy) but we'll continue to iterate based on feedback if this is the correct decision.
Also agree with paxys that the social implications here are deep and troubling. Having ambient AI in a home, even if it's caged to the home, has tricky privacy problems.
I really like the explorations of this space done in Black Mirror's The Entire History of You[1] and Ted Chiang's The Truth of Fact short story[2].
My bet is that the home and other private spaces almost completely yield to computer surveillance, despite the obvious problems. We've already seen this happen with social media and home surveillance cameras.
Just as in Chiang's story spaces were 'invaded' by writing, AI will fill the world and those opting out will occupy the same marginal positions as those occupied by dumb phone users and people without home cameras or televisions.
Interesting times ahead.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
Not if you use open source. Not if you pay for services contractually will not mine your data. Not if you support start-ups that commit to privacy and the banning of ads.
I said on another thread recently that we need to kill Android, that we need a new Mobile Linux that gives us total control over what our devices do, our software does. Not controlled by a corporation. Not with some bizarre "store" that floods us with millions of malware-ridden apps, yet bans perfectly valid ones. We have to take control of our own destiny, not keep handing it over to someone else for convenience's sake. And it doesn't end at mobile. We need to find, and support, the companies that are actually ethical. And we need to stop using services that are conveniently free.
Vote with your dollars.
The reason nobody uses mobile Linux is that it has to compete with AOSP-derived OSes like LineageOS and GrapheneOS, which don't suck or run like shit. This is what it looks like when people vote with their dollars, people want the status-quo we have (despite the horrible economic damages).
Like rooted Android phone, which is useless for regular folks because many critical apps doesn't work (like banking).
Friends at your house who value their privacy probably won’t feel great knowing you’ve potentially got a transcript of things they said just because they were in the room. Sure, it's still better than also sending everything up to OpenAI, but that doesn’t make it harmless or less creepy.
Unless you’ve got super-reliable speaker diarization and can truly ensure only opted-in voices are processed, it’s hard to see how any always-listening setup ever sits well with people who value their privacy.
This is something we call out under the "What we got wrong" section. We're currently collecting an audio dataset that should help create a speech-to-text (STT) model that incorporates speaker identification and that tag will be weaved into the core of the memory architecture.
> The shared household memory pool creates privacy situations we’re still working through. The current design has everyone in the family shares the same memory corpus. Should a child be able to see a memory their parents created? Our current answer is to deliberately tune the memory extraction to be household-wide with no per-person scoping because a kitchen device hears everyone equally. But “deliberately chose” doesn’t mean “solved.” We’re hoping our in-house STT will allow us to do per-person memory tagging and then we can experiment with scoping memories to certain people or groups of people in the household.
I wrote a blog post about this exact product space a year ago. https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...
I hope y'all succeed! The potential use cases for locally hosted AI dwarf what can be done with SaSS.
I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.
I'm not against AI in general, and some assistant-like functionality that functions on demand to search my digital footprint and handle necessary but annoying administrative tasks seems useful. But it feels like at some point it becomes a solution looking for a problem, and to squeeze out the last ounce of context-aware automation and efficiency you would have to outsource parts of your core mental model and situational awareness of your life. Imagine being over-scheduled like an executive who's assistant manages their calendar, but it's not a human it's a computer, and instead of it being for the purpose of maximizing the leverage of your attention as a captain of industry, it's just to maintain velocity on a personal rat race of your own making with no especially wide impact, even on your own psyche.
No matter how useful AI is and will become - I use AI daily, it is an amazing technology - so much of the discourse is indeed a solution looking for a problem. I have colleagues suggesting on exactly everything "can we put an MCP in it" and they don't even know what the point of MCP is!
It's a hell of a mousetrap.
Starts playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Or we could opt out, and help everyone get ahead, on the rising tide lifts all boats theory, but from what I've seen, the trickle of trickle down economics is urine.
A man-in-the-middle-of-the-middle-man.
We have some details here on how we’re doing the prototyping with some photos of the current prototype: https://juno-labs.com/blogs/how-we-validate-our-custom-ai-ha...
I’m not a product guy. Or a tech guy for that matter. Do you have any preparations in mind for Apple’s progress with AI (viz. their partnership with Google)? I don’t even know if the actual implementation would satisfy your vision with regard to everything staying local though.
Starting with an iPad for prototyping made me wonder why this didn’t begin as just an app. Or why not just ship the speaker + the app as a product.
You don’t have sketches? Like ballpoint pen on dot grid paper? This is me trying to nudge you away from the impression I get that the website is largely AI-scented.
After making my initial remarks (a purposely absurd one that I was actually surprised got upvoted at all), I checked your resume and felt a disconnect between your qualifications and the legitimate doubt I described in my comment.
To be honest my impression was mostly led by the contents of the website itself, speculation about the quality/reliability of the actual product followed.
I don’t want to criticize you and your decisions in that direction but if this ambition is legitimate it deserves better presentation.
Do you have any human beings involved in communicating your vision?
Given they're "still finalizing the design and materials" and are not based in China, I think it's a safe bet that the first run will either be delayed or be an alpha.
But this was only the beginning, after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it starts to complete sentences so successfully the conversation gradually dies out.
After a few days of silence... Narrator mode activated....
Apple bought those for $2B.. coming to Siri.
We ran queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity asking for product recommendations in ~30 B2B categories. The overlap between what each model recommends is surprisingly low -- around 40% agreement on the top 5 picks for any given category. And the correlation with Google search rankings? About 0.08.
So we already have a world where which CRM or analytics tool gets recommended depends on which model someone happens to ask, and nobody -- not the models, not the brands, not the users -- has any transparency into why. That's arguably more dangerous than explicit ads, because at least with ads you know you're being sold to.
Replace "LLMs" with "random schmucks online" and what changes exactly?
Big Brother is watching you. Who knew it would be AI ...
The author is quite right. It will be an advertisement scam. I wonder whether people will accept that though. Anyone remembers ublock origin? Google killed it on chrome. People are not going to forget that. (It still works fine on Firefox but Google bribed Firefox into submission; all that Google ad money made Firefox weak.)
Recently I had to use google search again. I was baffled at how useless it became - not just from the raw results but the whole UI - first few entries are links to useless youtube videos (also owned by Google). I don't have time to watch a video; I want the text info and extract it quickly. Using AI "summaries" is also useless - Google is just trying to waste my time compared to the "good old days". After those initial videos to youtube, I get about 6 results, three of which are to some companies writing articles so people visit their boring website. Then I get "other people searched for candy" and other useless links. I never understood why I would care what OTHER people search for when I want to search for something. Is this now group-search? Group-think 1984? And then after that, I get some more videos at youtube.
Google is clearly building a watered-down private variant of the web. Same problem with AMP pages. Google is annoying us - and has become a huge problem. (I am writing this on thorium right now, which is also chrome-based; Firefox does not allow me to play videos with audio as I don't have or use pulseaudio whereas the chrome-based browser does not care and my audio works fine - that shows you the level of incompetency at Mozilla. They don't WANT to compete against Google anymore. And did not want since decades. Ladybird unfortunately also is not going to change anything; after I critisized one of their decisions, they banned me. Well, that's a great way to try to build up an alternative when you deal with criticism via censorship - all before leaving alpha or beta already. Now imagine the amount of censorship you will get once millions of people WERE to use it ... something is fundamentally wrong with the whole modern web, and corporations have a lot to do with this; to a lesser extent also people but of course not all of them)
Apple? [1]
Even the article makes the mistake. They paint every company with a broad brush ("all AI companies are ad companies") but for Apple they are more sympathetic "We can quibble about Apple".
Apple's reality distort field is so strong. People still think they are not in ad business. People still think they stand up to government, and folks chose to ignore hard evidence (Apple operates in China on CCP's pleasure. Apple presents a gold plaque to President Trump to curry favors and removes ICEBlock apps ..) There's no pushback, there's no spine.
Every company is disgusting. Apple is hypocritical and disgusting.
- put them inside the soundproof box and they cannot hear anything outside
- the box even shows the amount of time for which the device has not been able to snoop on you daily
Genuine Q: Is this business model still feasible? Its hard to imagine anyone other than apple sustaining a business off of hardware; they have the power to spit out full hardware refreshes every year. How do you keep a team of devs alive on the seemingly one-and-done cash influx of first-time-buyers?
Google, meta, and amazon, sure, of course.
It's interesting that the "every company" part is only open ai... They're now part of the "bad guys spying on you to display ads." At least it's a viable business model, maybe they can recoup capex and yearly losses in a couple decades instead of a couple centuries.
If there's a camera in an AI device (like Meta Ray Ban glasses) then there's a light when it's on, and they are going out of their way to engineer it to be tamper resistant.
But audio - this seems to be on the other side of the line. Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent, flashing lights or other privacy preserving measures. And it's true, it's fundamentally different, because I have to make a proactive choice to speak, but I can't avoid being visible. So you can construct a logical argument for it.
I'm curious how this will really go down as these become pervasively available. Microphones are pretty easy to embed almost invisibly into wearables. A lot of them already have them. They don't use a lot of power, it won't be too hard to just have them always on. If we settle on this as the line, what's it going to mean that everything you say, everywhere will be presumed recorded? Is that OK?
That’s not accurate. There are plenty of states that require everyone involved to consent to a recording of a private conversation. California, for example.
Voice assistants today skirt around that because of the wake word, but always-on recording obviously negates that defense.
I'm not aware of many bluetooth headphones that blink an obvious light just because they are recording. You can get a pair of sunglassses with a microphone and record with it and it does nothing to alert anybody.
Whether it's actually legal or not, as you say, varies - but it's clear where device manufactures think the line lies in terms of what tech they implement.
Honestly, I'd say privacy is just as much about economics as it is technical architecture. If you've taken outside funding from institutional venture capitalists, it's only a matter of time before you're asked to make even more money™, and you may issue a quiet, boring change to your terms and conditions that you hope no one will read... Suddenly, you're removing mentions of your company's old "Don't Be Evil" slogan.
If you're paying someone else to run the inference for these models, or even to build these models, then you're ultimately relying on their specific preferences for which tools, brands, products, companies, and integrations they prefer, not necessarily what you need or want. If and when they deprecate the model your agentic workflow is built on, you now have to rebuild and re-validate it on whatever the new model is. Even if you go out of your way to run things entirely locally with expensive inference kit and a full security harness to keep things in check, you could spend a lot less just having it vomit up some slopcode that one of your human specialists can validate and massage into perpetual functionality before walling it off on a VM or container somewhere for the next twenty years.
The more you're outsourcing workflows wholesale to these bots, the more you're making yourself vulnerable to the business objectives of whoever hosts and builds those bots. If you're just using it as a slop machine to get you the software you want and that IT can support indefinitely, then you're going to be much better off in the long run.
Whereas I'd self-describe as "strategically lazy". It's building iterable code and repeatable processes today, so I can be lazy far into the future. It's engineering solutions today that are easier to support with lazier efforts tomorrow, regardless of whether things improve or get worse.
Building processes around agents predicated on a specific model is myopically lazy, because you'll be rebuilding and debugging that entire setup next year when your chosen agent is deprecated or retired. Those of us building documented code with agents today, will have an easier time debugging it in the future because the hard work is already done.
Incidentally, we'll also have gainful employment tomorrow by un-fucking agent-based workflows that didn't translate into software when tokens were cheap and subsidized by VCs for market capture purposes.
For once,we (as the technologists) have a free translator to laymen speak via the frontier LLMs, which can be an opportunity to educate the masses as to the exact world on the horizon.
It is actually both a technology and regulation/law issue.
What can be solved with the former should be. What is left, solved with the latter. With the best cases where both consistently/redundantly uphold our rights.
I want legal privacy protections, consistent with privacy preserving technology. Inconsistencies create technical and legal openings for nefarious or irresponsible powers.
(The article is an AI ad.)
This is like a shitty Disney movie.
Well the consumers will decide. Some people will find it very useful, but some others will not necessarily like this... Considering how many times I heard people yelling "OK GOOGLE" for "the gate" to open, I'm not sure a continuous flow of heavily contextualized human conversation will necessarily be easier to decipher?
I know guys, AI is magic and will solve everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ordered me eggs and butter when I mentioned out loud I was out of it but actually happy about this because I was just about to go on vacations. My surprise when I'm back: melted butter and rotten eggs at my door...
Is your argument that these affected parties are not users and that the GDPR does not require their consent?
Don't take this as hostility. I am 100% for local inference. But that is the way I understand the law, and I do think it benefits us to hold companies to a high standard. Because even such a device could theoretically be used against a person, or could have other unintended consequences.
if there's a market for a face camera that sends everything you see to meta, there's probably a market for whatever device openAI launches.
I have little hope that is true. Don't expect privacy laws and boycott campaigns. That very same elite control the law via bribes to US politicians (and indirectly the laws of other counties via those politicians threats, see the ongoing watering down of EU laws). They also directly control public discourse via ownership of the media and mainstream communication platforms. What backlash can they really suffer?
Even if these folks are giving away this device for 100% free, I'll still not keep it inside my house.