EDIT: Because someone downstream rightfully asked if we look at user's sandboxes: Yes! IF they ask us. Our users aren't engineers and often get stuck and even the LLM can't figure it out. THEN - AND ONLY THEN - we jack into the sandbox and help them.
To be fair agentic platforms are a shitty idea from a security perspective anyway. Everyone just threw that out of the window because shiny. Their funeral.
what's the worst that can happen?
Hackers trolling you? Stealing and deforming your projects? Hackers sharing personal info about you and your family and/or kids with the trashiest of people from your past or with your local authorities and wannabe matadors? All without your knowledge but you notice and get pseudo-paranoid and raise your security levels although it is technically and practically too fucking late?
Damn, how much these companies Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and ISPs and their hardware suppliers and all those parties and mayors and cities care about their paying customers and users and the people, workers and their children ...
Let's build more data centers and make AI infer smarter & faster. Better margin, better life.
Social media convinced people to publish on the web details of their personal life that they never would have voluntarily handed over to federal agents: political views, personal relationships, pictures of everywhere they've been, graphs of associates.
AI gets people to interactively divulge what they're working on and even to upload the files. It's the next step on a path from a past where intelligence agencies had to spy on people to a future where people pay for the privilege of volunteering everything to the intelligence agencies.
For instance, one customer has 15(!) cronjobs. And they all used LLM calls to do stuff. So they ran out of tokens super quick and asked us for help because they didn' tknow what to do. Its not an engineering company, the owner has a sales background. So we went in and wrote scripts for them so that the cron calls don't need to use the LLM anymore.
How do you then ensure it’s fixed for customers in the future? Do you add instructions to agents to write scripts where possible?
Another question I have, is from a product perspective, how do you decide how much of the internals you show to users (like token usage).
I always thought that seems like (from a non technical users POV), like a implementation detail; and quite hard to map to actual usage. For example, one request might use lots of tokens, and another will barely use any; but it can be difficult for a non technical user to undertand the difference.
I always assumed most SeriousBusiness companies over a certain size, not run by 20 year olds, operate similarly.
Sounds like your software might require HIPAA compliance in which case everything that you just said makes sense and is likely required in that context. But for the average SaaS that doesn't need HIPAA compliance it doesn't work like that.
And it's not particularly unusual to discuss vague details of your customers anonymously. Even in the medical field, with very strict privacy rules, doctors will often publicly discuss encounters they have had with patients, and they only cross the line when they identify the patient.
I mean I'm all for privacy and security but this statement right here just comes across as pretty paranoid
We are giving an unprecedented amount of personal data to these tools at the same time that the technology is being leveraged against people at an unprecedented scope and scale. No US legal framework exists to protect you against this. You should take this risk seriously.
But they didn't ask US for help. We didn't need to know a customer of yours is running 15 cronjobs. Even if this factoid itself may be harmless, it's a good thing to practice on how you talk about these things. I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, I don't know that, but I totally get why how you talk about it rubs some people (including me) the wrong way.
> Its not an engineering company, the owner has a sales background.
Again, it's good if you have a close relationship with your customers, but we don't, and they don't have one with us.
> We define literally in two senses:
> 1) in a literal sense or manner : actually
> 2) in effect : virtually
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
anyone surprised?
I thought I could name one (GitHub), but after checking, they can (e.g. if requested by law enforcement etc).
Therefore, the total I can name is 0.
It really goes a long way when the law stop saying "it's not nice if" and starts saying "if you can even if you don't then you're guilty".
The question was not "could the do all shitty things if they were scummy assholes", but "are they all scummy assholes".
Did the Google guys ever get caught saying that? Or using their power over the company to unsend messages, oh I guess you can't do that with email, but with Messenger you can...
A lot of people actually, even techies. I commented something similar on a different tech website (Ars Technica) highlighting the trustworthiness of the company behind the tool, and that by now people should not be surprised the face eating leopard eats faces. I was met with a lot of implicit defense of Meta and redirecting the attention to "whatabout" Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. (much like sibling reply here makes it an "every tech company" problem). The general agreement in that forum was that the company is not the problem, it's just what AI tooling does.
So either the internet is full of shills, or people are genuinely surprised because they chose ignorance for decades. Or maybe both can be true.
its not incompetent, its designed that way
To be clear, did the users intended for these conversations to be shared with someone? Meta just created a guessable capability URL?
Or were all Muse users' conversations by default public, just behind an obscure URL?
> fiscal-review-b4a5ff.cf.metaaiusercontent.com
So when someone opens the link, the DNS resolution exposes the unique hostname. The original bug reporter found dozens of these URLs in passive DNS logs.
Yes, it is. Just because you expected it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be reported.
> Didn't we all just presume that was what was happening? I mean they're a data mining company.
I know that, and you know that. Many people obviously still use their products and don’t understand that.
But to be honest this is all temporary. Muse, Grok, Dots will have users for the foreseeable future but there will be viable options for self-hosting too.
I am already doing it https://github.com/pdparchitect/noodle/
The Hub powers the entire family inference needs through a single device - 4 users - 8 device about 50 agents - mixture of local models and some subscriptions.
Obviously you cannot get frontier level of intelligence for coding tasks on a single Mac Mini/Studio but most people don't need that. Latest generation of open weight models are fine and in the worst case scenario bring your own regional cloud based inference services that value privacy. There are already plenty of companies in UK and Europe that provide serverless access to GLM, DeepSeek etc.
There is no point on saying "there is no guarantee software" as it is supposed to be "maybe it does not work" and not "it might make your life terrible"
After using it for a couple months, I'm converted. They're so good, the more you use it, the more useful it is; you internalise more of what it could be used for. It runs so many boring parts of my life, leaving me with more time to spend with my family.
I liken it to release of the first iPhone; it didn't invent any new technology, but packaged different bits of tech together in a way that was consumer friendly. I think we'll look back at OpenClaw/Hermes/Muse/Instinct in the same way.
I do worry about using purely cloud based offerings like Muse, I reckon there is a market for someone to package an consumer AI agent that lives on your home network.
I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database. I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.
Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).
Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.
Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.
I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...). I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.
It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me. As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.
Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.
I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).
I don't think "it does everything" or that it has "changed my life", but all of those examples are chores, things that I don't particularly enjoy doing; and if something can take it off my plate, then it's useful for me.
As for the rest, that is a lot of tokens burned to keep a fridge stocked.
Receipt emails are in a predictable format, so codex built scripts to parse the emails. If there is a receipt email it doesn't recognise, it will use an LLM to build a parser for that kind of email once.
The agent also "self improves", so after asking once to get items to restock, it wrote a skill with the query it used in, so it doesn't burn tokens figuring it out again.
I was impressed that after it logged into my supermarket account, it inspected the network traffic and discovered a GraphQL API, and used that (instead of screen scraping); much more economic.
I've averaged 2.6 cents a day in token costs over the last month.
For me my motivation is that I’m working 9-5, my children go to bed at 8pm, and I don’t have my phone on me so I can spend time with them.
Once they’re asleep, I’ve got 2 hours to spend with my partner before bed. I’d rather actually spend time with her rather than checking if we have enough kitchen roll.
Even as an experienced developer, sandboxing an agent is not trivial. The idea of my aunt, who has her passwords on a post-it-note on her monitor and forwards me scam emails using these things is terrifying.
usage-time growing fast, with tasks and cron jobs.
in the last spacex earnings report (few hours ago), Elon said he thinks their grok-bot will next year make up most of their AI inference usage across their datacenters.
basically he tried to imply these bots/personal-agents get lots of usage once users start customizing them. and it is bringing in a lot of money in API usage.
No one ever answers why that’s bad, though, or behind what. Turns out it’s behind in the procession walking towards the cliff. Maybe not such a bad idea to stay behind on that one.
> reported the findings through Meta’s bug bounty program on October 8 and also tried reaching people at Meta on LinkedIn, but got no reply either way.
Checks out
> The ease in discovering share links further justifies asking if Muse is worthy of the access it requires.
That's all you could justify?
Part of a huge problem with FAANG companies. You can't be Meta and just ratfuck your users for decades and then ask them to trust you, just like you can't be Amazon and turn your storefront into Temu-lite and expect people to want to order products sight unseen with your Echo shit.