Protecting Proprietary Platforms

An interview with Kazuto Yamaki of Sigma that appeared in LensVid raised an interesting point. I wonder how many people caught it. "Sigma doesn’t use AI to design lenses, for now. Mr. Yamaki said the knowledge required to make a high-quality lens is not available publicly; it is proprietary and kept inside the company…” As I’ve written a number of times, AI as being practiced at the moment is backwards looking, and the big AI companies have been scraping pretty much any information they can find anywhere. Public data, even Copyrighted or otherwise protected data (e.g. license agreements) is considered fair game to the Silicon Valley AI Vacuums. What Yamaki-san is referring to here is a fear that if they used one of the existing large language models to help with optical designs, in so doing they’d also expose the designs that they’ve been doing and probably the reasons for their decisions, too. But I don’t understand why they haven’t RAGed their own data in a private model (RAG =…