Q: When you think about the big vision — which still my mind is blown that this is your big vision, — of “I’m going to send a digital twin into a meeting, and it’s going to make decisions on my behalf that everyone trusts, that everyone agrees on, and everyone acts upon,” the privacy risk there is even higher. The security surface there becomes even more ripe for attack. If you can hack into my Zoom and get my digital twin to go do stuff on my behalf, woah, that’s a big problem. How do you think about managing that over time as you build toward that vision?

A: That’s a good question. So, I think again, back to privacy and security, I think of two things. First of all, it’s how to make sure somebody else will not hack into your meeting. This is Eric; it’s not somebody else. Another thing: during the call, make sure your conversation is very secure. Literally just last week, we announced the industry’s first post-quantum encryption. That’s the first one, and at the same time, look at deepfake technology — we’re also working on that as well to make sure that deepfakes will not create problems down the road. It is not like today’s two-factor authentication. It’s more than that, right? And because deepfake technology is real, now with AI, this is something we’re also working on — how to improve that experience as well.

Spoken like a true person who has not given one iota of thought to this issue and doesn't know what most of the words he's saying mean

lmao, Zoom is cooked. Their CEO has no idea how LLMs work or why they aren't fit for purpose, but he's 100% certain someone else will somehow solve this problem:

So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?

I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed. 

But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?

It’s someone down the stack. 

Okay.

I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself.

I believe that LLM can represent me anytime.

Talk about having the most replaceable job.

Start using AI from the top...REPLACE the CEO of zoom with an AI, if it works...then it can be implemented downwards.

FYI Jitsi Meet is an open source video conferencing app. It works similarly to Zoom, and is free. One can even host an instance on one's own system.

"About Jitsi: Video Conferencing Software. Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure video conferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting."

https://jitsi.org/

https://meet.jit.si/

Personal Note: In 2020 I took my classed online, having chosen to use Zoom, tho' Jitsi was on the list. Last September when Zoom changed their terms of service to include using our videos to train AI, I decided to switch to Jitsi. My operation is pretty small, and the $160/year I spent on Zoom was an expense I no longer needed.

So... what are the chances Zoom ends up recording people in Zoom meetings to use as training data?

I think this is a marvelous feature. Instead of attending useless calls or worse, in person conferences, yourself you have an unlimited amount of „digital twins“ that can accomplish nothing on your behalf.

AI is, roughly speaking, complete bullshit that should die in a fire.

But...

I work remotely and I would love if I could make Zoom make me look like my hair is perfectly combed, I'm wearing a collared shirt, I'm smiling, and in general I'm presentable and professional-looking without anyone on the Zoom call ever knowing it was a trick.

Not to say I think we'll achieve that any time in the foreseeable future, but one can wish.

What’s the elevator pitch now?

With conferencing, again, this is one app. If you look at your calendar, it is not only to join your video meeting but also a lot of other things. You read emails, send a chat message, make a phone call, have a whiteboard session, schedule something with external third parties. What we are doing now, it’s really looking at your entire schedule, how to leverage Zoom Workplace to help you out. Essentially, you can leave Zoom Workplace, and Zoom Workplace can help you get most of your work done, right? That’s our pitch.

That might be one of the worst pitches I've ever heard. Does that actually mean anything to anyone?