Category: Automotive

The Personal AI Greenfield

June 11, 2024 / / 11 Comments

What forms of pAI—personal AI—are Apple, Mozilla, Google, Meta, Microsoft and the rest not doing?

Let’s look at those first two because they’re at the top of the news LIFO buffer.

Apple Intelligence (“coming in beta this fall*“), announced yesterday, will help you with writing and creating images while giving you less lame answers from Siri. (Which they should re-name. Siri is Apple’s Clippy.) It “can draw on larger server-based models, running on Apple silicon, to handle more complex requests for you while protecting your privacy.” The “larger models” will be white-labeled ChatGPT, plus Apple’s own small language models (SLMs).

Mozilla, which got $400+ million a year from Google (for search in the Firefox browser) starting in 2020, announce on June 3 that they will be Building open, private AI with the Mozilla Builders Accelerator. Jive:

This program is designed to empower independent AI and machine learning engineers with the resources and support they need to thrive. It aims to cultivate a more innovative AI ecosystem, and it’s one of Mozilla’s key initiatives to make AI meaningfully impactful — alongside efforts like Mozilla.ai, the Responsible AI Challenge and the Rise25 Awards.

The Mozilla Builders Accelerator’s inaugural theme is local AI, which involves running AI models and applications directly on personal devices like laptops, smartphones, or edge devices rather than depending on cloud-based services…

We chose Local AI as the theme for the Accelerator’s first cohort because it aligns with our core values of privacy, user empowerment, and open source innovation. This method offers several benefits including:

  • Privacy: Data stays on the local device, minimizing exposure to potential breaches and misuse.
  • Agency: Users have greater control over their AI tools and data.
  • Cost-effectiveness: Reduces reliance on expensive cloud infrastructure, lowering costs for developers and users.
  • Reliability: Local processing ensures continuous operation even without internet connectivity.

Looks to me like both of these are Big AI writ small. It’s “local,” not personal. It’s made to serve your needs with what BigAI offers through APIs. It is still essentially AIaaS (AI as a Service), rather than truly personal AI (pAI): personalized more than personal.

That’s also what I see when I read between the lines at Mozilla’s AI job openings. Take platform engineer. This person will (among other things), “assist in managing and orchestrating workloads across multiple cloud providers.” That’s fine. I’m sure true pAIs will do that too. But most of pAI will be more personal than that. It will deal with the mundanities of your everyday life. Not with coughing up answers that can only come from AIaaSes.

The problem with personalizing AI giant offerings is that they are large language models (LLM) trained on everything that can be crawled on the Internet, plus who knows what else. Not on your truly personal stuff. This is why “prompt engineering” worthy of the noun is ” not for anybody:

Prompt engineering is crucial for deploying LLMs but is poorly understood mathematically. We formalize LLM systems as a class of discrete stochastic dynamical systems to explore prompt engineering through the lens of control theory. We investigate the reachable set of output token sequences $R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ for which there exists a control input sequence $\mathbf u$ for each $\mathbf y \in R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ that steers the LLM to output $\mathbf y$ from initial state sequence $\mathbf x_0$. We offer analytic analysis on the limitations on the controllability of self-attention in terms of reachable set, where we prove an upper bound on the reachable set of outputs $R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ as a function of the singular values of the parameter matrices. We present complementary empirical analysis on the controllability of a panel of LLMs, including Falcon-7b, Llama-7b, and Falcon-40b. Our results demonstrate a lower bound on the reachable set of outputs $R_y(\mathbf x_0)$ w.r.t. initial state sequences $\mathbf x_0$ sampled from the Wikitext dataset. We find that the correct next Wikitext token following sequence $\mathbf x_0$ is reachable over 97% of the time with prompts of $k\leq 10$ tokens. We also establish that the top 75 most likely next tokens, as estimated by the LLM itself, are reachable at least 85% of the time with prompts of $k\leq 10$ tokens. Intriguingly, short prompt sequences can dramatically alter the likelihood of specific outputs, even making the least likely tokens become the most likely ones. This control-centric analysis of LLMs demonstrates the significant and poorly understood role of input sequences in steering output probabilities, offering a foundational perspective for enhancing language model system capabilities.

But all that stuff applies mostly when we’re prompting a big LLM system.

What about using AI in our own lives, where the data that matters most are in our calendars, contacts, financial and health records, our travels, our correspondence (email, chat, whatever)? And how about all the location data we might get from our cars, phone apps, and phone companies? These should be much easier for a pAI to gather, examine, and help us do useful things. Caring about much less data also means a pAI will be less likely to give wrong (hallucinated) answers.

Today the mental frame almost everybody uses for AI is the Big kind, ingesting everything they can get their crawlers on, and munching all of it in giant compute farms. Those systems are great for lots of stuff, but they still don’t deal with personal data listed in the last paragraph.

Not yet, anyway.

Look at it this way. For each of us, there are three data pools:

  1. The entire Net, which is what gets crawled by all the giant LLM operators, plus whatever else they can get their claws on.
  2. One’s personal life, some of which is digitized in useful form (contacts, calendar, mail, stuff in folders inside PCs and attached drives).
  3. Personal data that is in the hands of giants, but is rightfully ours. These include our driving record and driving practices (,recorded by our late model cars and snitched to insurance companies and others), our location data (kept and shared by car and phone carriers to the likes of Google and the feds), our TV viewing habits, (gathered by Google, Amazon, Roku, Apple, etc.).

The pAI greenfield is with the last two.

Tell us who is working on what there, preferably with open source, and not sitting on walled garden silicon.

[Later… ] Since readers told me I had small language models (SLMs) wrong in one of the paragraphs above, and I’m not sure I had them right, I rewrote them out of the piece. I invite readers to post comments to further correct and expand on the subject of pAIs and what they can do.

Coming soon to a radio near you: Personalized ads

September 25, 2023 / / 2 Comments

And privacy be damned.

See, there is an iron law for every new technology: What can be done will be done. And a corollary that says, —until it’s clear what shouldn’t be done.  Let’s call those Stage One and Stage Two.

With respect to safety from surveillance in our cars, we’re at Stage One.

For Exhibit A, read what Ray Schultz says in Can Radio Time Be Bought With Real-Time Bidding? iHeartMedia is Working On It:

HeartMedia hopes to offer real-time bidding for its 860+ radio stations in 160 markets, enabling media buyers to buy audio ads the way they now buy digital.

“We’re going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side,” said Rich Bressler, president and COO of iHeart Media, during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, according to Radio Insider.

Bressler did not offer specifics or a timeline. He added: “If you look at broadcasters in general, whether they’re video or audio, I don’t think anyone else is going to have those capabilities out there.”

“The ability, whenever it comes, would include data-infused buying, programmatic trading and attribution,” the report adds.

The Trade Desk lists iHeart Media as one of its programmatic audio partners.

Audio advertising allows users to integrate their brands into their audiences’ “everyday routines in a distraction-free environment, creating a uniquely personalized ad experience around their interests,” the Trade Desk says.

The Trade Desk “specializes in real-time programmatic marketing automation technologies, products, and services, designed to personalize digital content delivery to users.” Translation: “We’re in the surveillance business.”

Never mind that there is negative demand for surveillance by the surveilled. Push-back has been going on for decades.  Here are 154 pieces I’ve written on the topic since 2008.

One might think radio is ill-suited for surveillance because it’s an offline medium. Peopler listen more to actual radios than to computers or phones. Yes, some listening is online; but  not much, relatively speaking. For example, here is the bottom of the current radio ratings for the San Francisco market:

Those numbers are fractions of one percent of total listening in the country’s most streaming-oriented market.

So how are iHeart and The Trade Desk going to personalize radio ads?  Well, here is a meaningful excerpt from iHeart To Offer Real-Time Bidding For Its Broadcast Ad Inventory, which ran earlier this month at Inside Radio:

The biggest challenge at iHeartMedia isn’t attracting new listeners, it’s doing a better job monetizing the sprawling audience it already has. As part of ongoing efforts to sell advertising the way marketers want to transact, it now plans to bring real-time bidding to its 850 broadcast radio stations, top company management said Thursday.

“We’re going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side,” President and COO Rich Bressler said during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. “If you look at broadcasters in general, whether they’re video or audio, I don’t think anyone else is going to have those capabilities out there.”

Real-time bidding is a subcategory of programmatic media buying in which ads are bought and sold in real time on a per-impression basis in an instant auction. Pittman and Bressler didn’t offer specifics on how this would be accomplished other than to say the company is currently building out the technology as part of a multi-year effort to allow advertisers to buy iHeart inventory the way they buy digital media advertising. That involves data-infused buying and programmatic trading, along with ad targeting and campaign attribution.

Radio’s largest group has also moved away from selling based on rating points to transacting on audience impressions, and migrated from traditional demographics to audiences or cohorts. It now offers advertisers 800 different prepopulated audience segments, ranging from auto intenders to moms that had a baby in the last six months…

Advertisers buy iHeart’s ad inventory “in pieces,” Pittman explained, leaving “holes in between” that go unsold. “Digital-like buying for broadcast radio is the key to filling in those holes,” he added…

…there has been no degradation in the reach of broadcast radio. The degradation has been in a lot of other media, but not radio. And the reason is because what we do is fundamentally more important than it’s ever been: we keep people company.”

Buried in that rah-rah is a plan to spy on people in their cars. Because surveillance systems are built into every new car sold. In Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla — Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota — Flunks Privacy Test, Mozilla pulls together a mountain of findings about just how much modern cars spy on their drivers and passengers, and then pass personal information on to many other parties. Here is one relevant screen grab:

spying

As for consent? When you’re using a browser or an app, you’re on the global Internet, where the GDPR, the CCPA, and other privacy laws apply, meaning that websites and apps have to make a show of requiring consent to what you don’t want. But cars have no UI for that. All their computing is behind the dashboard where you can’t see it and can’t control it. So the car makers can go nuts gathering fuck-all, while you’re almost completely in the dark about having your clueless ass sorted into one or more of Bob Pittman’s 800 target categories. Or worse, typified personally as a category of one.

Of course, the car makers won’t cop to any of this. On the contrary, they’ll pretend they are clean as can be. Here is how Mozilla describes the situation:

Many car brands engage in “privacy washing.” Privacy washing is the act of pretending to protect consumers’ privacy while not actually doing so — and many brands are guilty of this. For example, several have signed on to the automotive Consumer Privacy Protection Principles. But these principles are nonbinding and created by the automakers themselves. Further, signatories don’t even follow their own principles, like Data Minimization (i.e. collecting only the data that is needed).

Meaningful consent is nonexistent. Often, “consent” to collect personal data is presumed by simply being a passenger in the car. For example, Subaru states that by being a passenger, you are considered a user — and by being a user, you have consented to their privacy policy. Several car brands also note that it is a driver’s responsibility to tell passengers about the vehicle’s privacy policies.

Autos’ privacy policies and processes are especially bad. Legible privacy policies are uncommon, but they’re exceptionally rare in the automotive industry. Brands like Audi and Tesla feature policies that are confusing, lengthy, and vague. Some brands have more than five different privacy policy documents, an unreasonable number for consumers to engage with; Toyota has 12. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to find a contact with whom to discuss privacy concerns. Indeed, 12 companies representing 20 car brands didn’t even respond to emails from Mozilla researchers.

And, “Nineteen (76%) of the car companies we looked at say they can sell your personal data.”

To iHeart? Why not? They’re in the market.

And, of course, you are not.

Hell, you have access to none of that data. There’s what the dashboard tells you, and that’s it.

As for advice? For now, all I have is this: buy an old car.

 

 

How yours is your car?

February 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Peugeot

I’ve owned a lot of bad cars in my decades.  But some I’ve loved, at least when they were on the road. One was the 1965 Peugeot 404 wagon whose interior you see above, occupied by family dog Christy, guarding the infant seat next to her. You’ll note that the hood is open, because I was working on it at the time, which was constantly while I owned it.

I shot that photo in early 1974, not long after arriving at our new home in Graham, North Carolina. The trip down from our old home in far northern New Jersey was one of the most arduous I’ve ever taken, with frequent stops to fix whatever went wrong along the way, which was plenty.

Trouble started when a big hunk of rusted floor fell away beneath my feet, so I could see the New Jersey Turnpike whizzing by down there, while worrying that the driver’s seat itself might fall to the moving pavement, and my ass with it.

The floor had rusted because rainwater would gather in the air vents between the far side of the windshield and the dashboard, and suddenly splat down on one’s feet, and the floor, soon as the car began to move.  (The floor was prepared for this with a drainage system of tubes laminated between layers of metal, meant to carry downward whatever water fell on top. Great foresight, I suppose. But less prepared was the metal itself, which was determined to rust.)

Later a can attached to the exhaust manifold blew to pieces so sound and exhaust straight from the engine sounded like a machine gun and could be heard to the horizons in all directions, and echoed into the cabin off the pavement through the new hole in the floor. I am sure that the hearing loss I have now began right then.

I replaced the lost metal with an emptied V8 juice can that I filled with steel wool for percussive exhaust damping, and fastened into place with baling wire that I carried just in case of, well, anything. I also always carried a large toolbox, because you never know. If you owned a cheap used car back in those days, you had to be ready for anything.

The car did have its appeals, some of which were detailed by coincidence a month ago by Raphael Orlove in Jalopnik, calling this very model the best wagon he’s ever driven. His reasons were correct—for a working car. The best feature was a cargo area was so far beyond capacious that I once loaded a large office desk into it with room to spare. It also had double shocks on the rear axle, to help handle the load, plus other arcane graces meant for heavy use, such as a device in the brake fluid line to the rear axle that kept the brakes from locking up when both rear wheels were spinning but off the ground. This, I was told, was for drivers on rough dirt roads in Africa.

While the Peugeot 404 was not as weird in its time as the Citroën DS or 2CV (both of which my friend Julius called “triumphs of French genius over French engineering”), it was still weird as shit in some remarkably impractical ways.

For example, screw-on hubcaps. These meant no tire machine could handle changing a tire, and you had to do the job by hand with tire irons and a sledgehammer. I carried those too. For unknown reasons, Peugeot also also hid spark plugs way down inside the valve cover, and fed them electricity through a spring inside a bakelite sleeve that was easy to break and would malfunction even if they weren’t broken.

I could go on, but all that stuff is beside my point, which is that this car was, while I had it, mine. I could fix it myself, or take it to a mechanic friendly to the car’s oddities. While some design features were odd or crazy, there were no mysteries about how the car worked, or how to fix or replace its parts. More importantly, it contained no means for reporting its behavior or use back to Peugeot, or to anybody.

It’s very different today. That difference is nicely unpacked in A Fight Over the Right to Repair Cars Turns Ugly, by @Aarian Marshall in Wired. At issue are right-to-repair laws, such as the one currently raising a fuss in Massachusetts.

See, all of us and our mechanics had a right to repair our own cars for most of the time since automobiles first hit the road. But cars in recent years have become digital as well as mechanical beings. One good thing about this is that lots of helpful diagnostics can be revealed. One bad thing is that many of those diagnostics are highly proprietary to the carmakers, as the cars themselves become so vertically integrated that only dealers can repair them.

But there is hope. Reports Aarian,

…today anyone can buy a tool that will plug into a car’s port, accessing diagnostic codes that clue them in to what’s wrong. Mechanics are able to purchase tools and subscriptions to manuals that guide them through repairs.

So for years, the right-to-repair movement has held up the automotive industry as the rare place where things were going right. Independent mechanics remain competitive: 70 percent of auto repairs happen at independent shops, according to the US trade association that represents them. Backyard tinkerers abound.

But new vehicles are now computers on wheels, gathering an estimated 25 gigabytes per hour of driving data—the equivalent of five HD movies. Automakers say that lots of this information isn’t useful to them and is discarded. But some—a vehicle’s location, how specific components are operating at a given moment—is anonymized and sent to the manufacturers; sensitive, personally identifying information like vehicle identification numbers are handled, automakers say, according to strict privacy principles.

These days, much of the data is transmitted wirelessly. So independent mechanics and right-to-repair proponents worry that automakers will stop sending vital repair information to the diagnostic ports. That would hamper the independents and lock customers into relationships with dealerships. Independent mechanics fear that automakers could potentially “block what they want” when an independent repairer tries to access a car’s technified guts, Glenn Wilder, the owner of an auto and tire repair shop in Scituate, Massachusetts, told lawmakers in 2020.

The fight could have national implications for not only the automotive industry but any gadget that transmits data to its manufacturer after a customer has paid money and walked away from the sales desk. “I think of it as ‘right to repair 2.0,’” says Kyle Wiens, a longtime right-to-repair advocate and the founder of iFixit, a website that offers tools and repair guides. “The auto world is farther along than the rest of the world is,” Wiens says. Independents “already have access to information and parts. Now they’re talking about data streams. But that doesn’t make the fight any less important.”

As Cory Doctorow put it two days ago in Agricultural right to repair law is a no-brainer, this issue is an extremely broad one that basically puts Big Car and Big Tech on one side and all the world’s gear owners and fixers on the other:

Now, there’s new federal agricultural Right to Repair bill, courtesy of Montana Senator Jon Tester, which will require Big Ag to supply manuals, spare parts and software access codes:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21194562/tester-bill.pdf

The legislation is very similar to the Massachusetts automotive Right to Repair ballot initiative that passed with a huge margin in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

Both initiatives try to break the otherwise indomitable coalition of anti-repair companies, led by Apple, which destroyed dozens of R2R initiatives at the state level in 2018:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

It’s a bet that there is more solidarity among tinkerers, fixers, makers and users of gadgets than there is among the different industries who depend on repair price-gouging. That is, it’s a bet that drivers will back farmers’ right to repair and vice-versa, but that Big Car won’t defend Big Ag.

The opposing side in the repair wars is on the ropes. Their position is getting harder and harder to maintain with a straight face. It helps that the Biden administration is incredibly hostile to that position:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#r2r

It’s no coincidence that this legislation dropped the same week as Aaron Perzanowski’s outstanding book “The Right to Repair” — R2R is an idea whose time has come to pass.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#r2r

[The next day…]

Cory just added this in a follow-up newsletter and post:

…remember computers are intrinsically universal. Even if manufacturers don’t cooperate with interop, we can still make new services and products that plug into their existing ones. We can do it with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots – a suite of tactics we call Adversarial Interoperability or Competitive Compatibility (AKA “comcom”):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

These tactics have a long and honorable history, and have been a part of every tech giant’s own growth…

Read all three of those pieces. There is much to be optimistic about, especially once the fighting is mostly done, and companies have proven knowledge that free customers—and truly free markets—are more valuable than captive ones. That has been our position at ProjectVRM from the start. Perhaps, once #R2R and #comcom start paying off, we’ll finally have one of the proofs we’ve wanted all along.

Salon with Robin Chase

February 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Robin Chase, co-founder and original CEO of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism, will speak at the Ostrom Workshop s Beyond the Web Salon Series at Indiana University at 2:00 PM Eastern this coming Monday, February 7, 2022. The event link is here, where you’ll also find the Zoom link.

The full theme of the salon series is Beyond the Web: Making a platform-free online marketplace for goods, ideas and everything else, about which you can read more here.

Robin’s work with transportation and peer production has been VRooMy from the start, and especially consistent with our work with the Ostrom Workshop on the Intention Byway in Bloomington, Indiana.

Upcoming speakers in the Salon Series (mark your calendars) are Ethan Zuckerman and Shoshana Zuboff. Both are BKC veterans and, like Robin, devoted to moving beyond status quos that vex us all. Ethan will be with us on March 7 and Shoshana on April 11. Days and times for both are Mondays at 2:00 PM Eastern. Details at those links.<

These events are all participatory, informative, challenging and fun. Please join us.

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