Its data was already used to train AI, maybe they could have sold it to the big AI companies? I am guessing its too late for that. All they have is their previous name and user fondness.
But now with the usage fallen, maybe they could train their own coding models to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, sort of like a hybrid of their previous forum + AI. AI solutions that work will get locked as "Accepted" by stack overflow like before via user vote.
I would suspect her phone first before looking for a physical device. An android phone is particularly vulnerable to being backdoored by cyber criminals that you can hire. Also any other computer or laptop in the house can similarly be compromised.
After that, the wifi thing is easy to check as you mentioned, but a dedicated listening device can also have a build in LTE radio with a SIM card. There is no upper limit on sophistication, even a completely passive device without external power is possible if the hostile actor has the money.[1]
it's not beyond the realm of possibility to train it. I emailed 30-40 people already with 37 screenshots including text generation and training. Not a single response. I thought for the time being this path is preferable over huggingspace/github. I'm not ruling out just open source and large .bin pretrained file...i'd need to think about it more.
The frontier of how good models are also shifts and will remain ahead of local models unless we hit some dead end limitation in the algorithms themselves. A ceiling so to speak on how good LLM can get before the law of diminishing returns starts to apply.
I think it would be the opposite and we are all in for a rude awakening. If you have tried playing with Opus 4.6 you would know what I am talking about.
I tell my colleagues we're in the instantaneous peak of the AI developer relationship, especially for code monkeys. We're still valued, still paid really well, and our jobs will get easier and easier probably for the next 5-10 years! After that, maybe not so great for many of us, with the developers that use software as a means of their actual profession continuing to do just fine (hard math/science/optimization/business planning/project planners/etc).
I think it's going to be an amazing shift from those that know intricate details of software to enabling those that have the best ideas that can be implemented with software (a shift from tool makers to tool users).
I think many developers misunderstand the quality of software that people outside of software are willing to live with, if it does exactly what they want when they need it. For a user, it's all black box "do something I want or not" regardless of what's under the hood. Mostly "academic", things like "elegant" and "clean" and "maintainable" almost never practically matter for most practical solutions to actual problems. This is something I learned far too late in my professional career, where the lazy dev with shite code would get the same recognition as the guy that had beautiful code: does it solve the real world problem or not?
Safety critical, secure, etc, sure, but most is not. And, even with those, the libraries/APIs/etc are separate components.
