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AI creates the reverse problem. In the AI age, the buyer risks giving away knowledge, just in order to use what they bought.
You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful. The better you want the model to perform, the more of that knowledge you have to feed it!
Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed. The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return.
That is what I think of as the Reverse Information Paradox.
Patents solve one aspect of Arrow’s paradox. They let an inventor disclose an idea without simply giving it away. The Reverse Information Paradox needs its own equivalent.
While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data. If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself. Therefore, it's imperative that we distribute the learning infrastructure to every firm so that they can control their own learning loop.
In the cloud era, enterprises accumulated data. In the AI era, they accumulate learning. The trust boundary must evolve accordingly, from protecting information to protecting the mechanisms through which organizations learn, adapt, and compound intelligence. There are a few things every enterprise must do to ensure this:
- Control: Create your private evals, because evals define what “good” looks like inside the organization. Also, retain ownership of your organization’s memory, traces, feedbacks, decisions, and institutional context, and ability to use outputs of models from your own tasks and queries.
- Capability: Build your own proprietary learning environments within the tenant boundary to train or tune models, where models learn against real workflows without exposing the company’s knowledge.
- Choice: Ensure the orchestration layer is decoupled from any single model. Ask yourself: If any one model you are using is taken away, do you still have the ability to operate and optimize for your evals using other models? Does your company “veteran” capability remain with you even if a given “generalist” model is taken away?
- Cost: By decoupling the orchestration layer, you are also able to bring together context, models, and tasks in the most efficient and cost-effective way without sacrificing quality.
- Compound: Bring these four together and you create your own continuous learning loop (i.e. hill climbing machine) that will allow your AI investments to compound the value of your firm.