What Next - TBD Will A.I. Close Off the Internet

Metadata

• Podcast: Slate Technology
• URL: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/historyofthefuture
• PublishDate:: 2023-04-21
• Document Tags: #tech #gpt

Description

Reddit announced it will start charging companies to use its huge, ever-growing trove of text to train A.I. chatbots. It’s another expense for the fledgling tech and another knock against the “open internet” ideals that Reddit once embodied.  Guest: Mike Isaac, tech reporter for the New York Times. If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 00:06:01 - LLM's need computing power and data. They need it to understand the world around them. It's only as smart as the info they have available to them.
• 00:07:04 - Our open web content is all just hanging out there and they want that data to understand what it's like for ie a teenager to go through a breakup. there's never enough data...the world is constantly changing, language is changing.
• 00:08:31 - Wikipedia is one of the largest corpus of info and it's maintained by regular people. It's good enough for LLM's to train on and it's free. And it's hardcore web people that believe this info should be free. And they ask for donations but now the people that own this data are seeing that these companies are sucking up this data and not giving anything back.
• 00:10:19 - What makes Reddit valuable is that it's an encyclopedic library and people talk like regular humans. It was one of the few remaining open social networks that allowed Google and Bing to crawl and index them. New value in the context of AI is trying to parse what people mean when they answer a question and to decipher irony.
• 00:16:24 - Suddenly it feels like these are more of a monetizable thing. Is it an inflection point? Perhaps by the end of the year the algos themselves (many open source) will be less valuable as they become more similar and the datasets themselves will go up behind walls and become more valuable. Twitter also followed this trend and put their API behind a paywall.
• 00:19:17 - Will this turn the open internet into something smaller, more insular, more expensive? Will be interesting to see what Shutterstock, Wikipedia, and even Getty do. Or will they try to fight these companies over copyright?