Six years ago I published a, shall we say, under the radar book on digital rights, called Control Shift. It was mainly concerned with how issues such as online privacy had already developed, but towards the end I wrote a speculative bit about virtual assistants. If you’ll excuse the self-quotation, I noted that “these proto-A.I.s don’t really work for us” because of their reliance on centralized, cloud-based systems—but future advances in A.I. could allow for on-device, open-source assistants that act as our trustworthy and discreet agents, rather than mere front-ends for Big Tech surveillance. This could help “fix the future,” I wrote hopefully.
Which is why I was extremely intrigued to see Qualcomm and Meta’s announcement yesterday about getting the Facebook firm’s newly open-sourced LLaMa 2 model to play nicely on Qualcomm-powered mobile devices, PCs, VR/AR headsets, and cars. People have already been playing with the first (leaked) LLaMa on Android phones, but this kind of official support should make for much better performance. Sure, Big Tech doesn’t get much bigger than Meta—a company that obviously looms large in any recap of digital rights abuses—but there are seeds of hope to be found here.
