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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2024

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  • There seem to be conflicting opinions on the matter:

    https://netzpolitik.org/2024/pay-or-okay-privatsphaere-nur-gegen-gebuehr/

    https://www.etes.de/blog/pay-or-okay-pur-abo-modell-zulaessig/

    In any case, the requirements for “pay or okay” being legal are: (translated with deepl)

    Equivalent alternative

    “In principle, the tracking of user behavior can be based on consent if a tracking-free model is offered as an alternative, even if this is subject to payment. However, the service that users receive in a paid model must firstly represent an equivalent alternative to the service that they obtain through consent. Secondly, the consent must meet all the conditions for effectiveness set out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), i.e. in particular the requirements listed in Art. 4 No. 11 and Art. 7 GDPR. Whether the payment option - e.g. a monthly subscription - is to be regarded as an equivalent alternative to consent to tracking depends in particular on whether users are given equivalent access to the same service in return for a standard market fee. Equivalent access generally exists if the offers include the same service, at least in principle.”

    Data processing for ad-free use

    If a user opts for the subscription option, only storage and readout processes that are technically absolutely necessary may take place (Section 25 (1) TTDSG). Furthermore, the permissions under Art. 6 para. 1 GDPR must be complied with.

    Granularity/prohibition of general consent for non-subscribers

    “If there are several processing purposes that differ significantly from one another, the requirements for voluntariness must be met to the effect that consent can be granted on a granular basis. This means, among other things, that users must be able to actively select the individual purposes for which consent is to be obtained (opt-in). Only if purposes are very closely related can a bundling of purposes be considered. A blanket overall consent for different purposes in this respect cannot be effectively granted.”

    Transparency, comprehensibility and information

    In addition, the consents must meet the other requirements of the GDPR. This applies in particular to the principle of transparency, comprehensibility and compliance with information obligations.

    As I see it, at the very least the granularity requirement is not fulfilled in these cases.









  • Funnily enough, this is also my field, though I am not at uni anymore since I now work in this area. I agree that current literature rightfully makes no claims of AGI.

    Calling transformer models (also definitely not the only type of LLM that is feasible - mamba, Llada, … exist!) “fancy autocomplete” is very disingenuous in my view. Also, the current boom of AI includes way more than the flashy language models that the general population directly interacts with, as you surely know. And whether a model is able to “generalize” depends on whether you mean within its objective boundaries or outside of them, I would say.

    I agree that a training objective of predicting the next token in a sequence probably won’t be enough to achieve generalized intelligence. However, modelling language is the first and most important step on that path since us humans use language to abstract and represent problems.

    Looking at the current pace of development, I wouldn’t be so pessimistic, though I won’t make claims as to when we will reach AGI. While there may not be a complete theoretical framework for AGI, I believe it will be achieved in a similar way as current systems are, being developed first and explained after.



  • The goalpost has shifted a lot in the past few years, but in the broader and even narrower definition, current language models are precisely what was meant by AI and generally fall into that category of computer program. They aren’t broad / general AI, but definitely narrow / weak AI systems.

    I get that it’s trendy to shit on LLMs, often for good reason, but that should not mean we just redefine terms because some system doesn’t fit our idealized under-informed definition of a technical term.


  • Ah yes Mr. Professor, mind telling us how you came to this conclusion?

    To me you come off like an early 1900s fear monger a la “There will never be a flying machine, humans aren’t meant to be in the sky and it’s physically impossible”.

    If you literally meant that there is no such thing yet, then sure, we haven’t reached AGI yet. But the rest of your sentence is very disingenuous toward the thousands of scientists and developers working on precisely these issues and also extremely ignorant of current developments.


  • No, at least not in the sense that “hallucination” is used in the context of LLMs. It is specifically used to differentiate between the two cases you jumbled together: outputting correct information (as is represented in the training data) vs outputting “made-up” information.

    A language model doesn’t “try” anything, it does what it is trained to do - predict the next token, yes, but that is not hallucination, that is the training objective.

    Also, though not widely used, there are other types of LLMs, e.g. diffusion-based ones, which actually do not use a next token prediction objective and rather iteratively predict parts of the text in multiple places at once (Llada is one such example). And, of course, these models also hallucinate a bunch if you let them.

    Redefining a term to suit some straw man AI boogeyman hate only makes it harder to properly discuss these issues.