(2024-01-11) Hon S17e04 You Dont Want An Intelligent Assistant Protocols Not Platforms

Dan Hon: s17e04: You don’t want an intelligent assistant; Protocols, Not Platforms

Yesterday I used Llamaindex to shove a corpus of several hundred newsletter episodes into a word vector store, hooked it up to a query engine and chatbot engine and started figuring out how to ask questions about what I’ve written. First I tried to do it against a local model, gave up, and then became the biggest hypocrite by spending about $13 worth of OpenAI credits against GPT4

1.1 You don’t want an intelligent assistant (Intelligent Software Assistant)

I mean clearly you do, because who doesn’t want a magic thing that magically does what you tell it to do? A sort of WYGIWYM, a What You Get Is What You Mean machine.

Benedict Evans had kicked off a discussion on Threads about what he thought was the failure of the pen computing paradigm, because Apple have shipped “a technically flawless pen computer, and it’s pretty much useless for anything except actually drawing. Pen computing didn’t happen”. He then compares it to voice/natural language processing and its surfacing in chatbots. I think this is also in response to the Rabbit R1

I wrote last time, briefly, about the potential technical implementation of what Rabbit is supposed to do

really can’t see how it works in today’s economic landscape.

All of these methods rely on the good graces of the underlying providing service, none of which I think are particularly incentivized to hand-off access (value!) to a third party provider, even if they’re being paid. Never mind the security implications if this access isn’t mediated through a formal API.

A useful intelligent agent that can be invoked over voice or text requires, I think, a frankly terrifying amount of contextual and personal information about you

I want to take my family to London

Look, I don’t know demo guy’s family situation. But I would have to be fantastically rich to use this to not just plan but also book a family trip

In this example, for the agent to be useful, you’d want it to have access to your calendar so it doesn’t book flights that are less convenient.

One way of looking at this is that useful agents have an experienced, mature world model

The agent -- whether human or software -- would need to know where you live, your calendar, in this case it’s explicitly told the age of your kids. If you’ve been flying for a while, you’d want it to know that you prefer one airline over another. You might want to use your reward points. You might want to pay with one credit card over a different one.

In our current environment, what would you trust with that kind of information?

you’d probably want some defaults so that you don’t end up repeating yourself every single time. i.e. remember that when I say a family trip, I don’t need to remind anything that I have kids. (And ideally remember that people age over time!)

some sort of hybrid interface, it’s not like text entry is going to go away completely (I don’t think) - yes, gesturing and talking are more natural, but that doesn’t also mean that they’re more efficient or that they can’t also be more precise.

the need for more contextual information is asymptotic: more information will always be better, so there will always be requests for more information

1.2 Protocols, Not Platforms

I re-read Mike Masnick’s paper, Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech recently

because Substack were succeeding at annoying as many people as possible.

people have very different values of what they consider acceptable speech

Masnick’s proposal is choice in moderation. Right now, like I’ve written about before, the regulatory framework assumes choice between platform, and that’s the layer at which competition works

A protocol-based approach would, at a high level, seek to provide a marketplace of filters for each platform

Masnick suggests that there are new business models here -- one might subscribe (pay?) for moderation filters or other services provided by the ACLU or the EFF. I think a sticking point here is the cost and infrastructure required to sustain such filters at scale, if that scale is needed.

Another aside. LinkedIn’s homepage/feed is now effectively a For You feed with no option for a following feed. I hate it (algorithmic feed)

One thing that stood out to me from Masnick’s 2019 paper was its mention of Reddit. First, he compares Reddit to Usenet

because management subreddit communities is in practice devolved to the moderators of those communities, you can get “good” subreddits and “bad” subreddits

The moderators of pretty much all the big subreddits (citation needed) use bots to manage their communities. These bots use the Reddit APIs to do content and community moderation tailored to that community and its needs, because the bots are, well, written by highly integrated (and responsible?) members of the community.

A shift to protocols will not happen absent regulation

a protocol-based approach would, I think, be a more efficient way -- a less hacky one, at least? -- to deal with the increasingly different demands of nation states in terms of how platforms treat content