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Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

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Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#171

Post by chess_horse_L »

rjh29 wrote: post #76
duxup wrote: post #64

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches? Is it? When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations. Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic. For e…

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook an…

To be fair, I found the best alternatives are just friends, and Twitter.

In Twitter you can follow people whose content you find useful. If you're a Blender user, for example, you can follow 5 Blender tech artists and your feed will be now full of cool tips and art.

With friends, with more or less the same skillset and hobbies as you have, you can ask them whatever you wanna ask. Heck, you'll learn a lot from them without even asking!

I'd just avoid using Reddit or forums to decide if I'm gonna use or buy something.

For example, if you ask what's the best OS on the internet, people will say Linux. Best DAW? Reaper. Best game engine? Godot. Best headphones? whatever is new and costs 100$ in Amazon.

Meanwhile, friends who make money and are in the industry and have businesses just prefer Windows, FL Studio and Unity. They aren't on the Reddit saying that the software or hardware they use - they just use them and make money. :)

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#172

Post by mbmjertan »

eggbrain wrote: post #42

I think from Reddit's perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I'm sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took: - The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years - The "goodwill" that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data - Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to thei…

Given that sama is a board member of Reddit Inc, and that this is happening after GPT-4 was trained on Reddit data, I wouldn't jump to conclude they're upset at OpenAI.

SO had publicly available, no-auth-required data dumps. This makes it difficult for them to know who is using their data. However, this surely isn't the case for Reddit who offered only API endpoints for this content, and I'm guessing you couldn't use .json to get the whole site (rate limits, etc). I wouldn't be inclined to believe that Reddit would miss a new major API user.

This is purely speculation disregarding Hanlon's razor, but I'm thinking that the API pricing comes down to killing two birds with one stone.

* Sama got to train his LLM on Reddit and some best-of-the-internet content there such as r/bodyweightfitness, informed discussions on niche topics etc for free. The catch-up players face prohibitive pricing.

* Third-party apps get killed, bringing the UX to Reddit's control. I think this is more important to Reddit than ad revenue, as they could've simply built an SDK for probably less than this PR nightmare will cost us.

* Their new development platform, however, hints at the Reddit app supporting serving "redditor-made apps" which "can be seamlessly reused between communities".

The description (and the idea to have apps in your app) weirdly reminds me of WeChat apps, and given that Tencent is a major shareholder in Reddit, I would consider the possibility that apps are something they're pushing. That idea has no chance of success without the UX being completely in Reddit's hands, even then it's questionable how it would work on Reddit.

Spez couldn't actually be that detached from Reddit?

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#173

Post by refulgentis »

bbor wrote: post #118
nostrademons wrote: post #62

The leaked Google memo "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" is instructive here: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne... Original author is an ML researcher, and the crux of his argument is that most weights in a LLM are significantly overdetermined. Once you have ingested several terabytes of natural language, you know how to generate natural language. The remaining misses are facts tha…

This is a great analysis that really cleared up the impact of that memo for that me. You clearly know but for any readers who aren’t clear: that memo is the opinion of one engineer at google, and far from the (apparent) opinion of the relevant execs

It’s dead wrong, I suggest reading the original. _No one_ thinks models trained on more data would be about the same, since everything flows out of that premise…then throws Current Thing on top…it’s very unhelpful.

The “patches” he refers to are LoRA and are treated as deus ex machina. They’re not, ex. playing with Stable Diffusion we can see they’re additive but they’re not nearly as good as training the original model on the data.

(Disclaimer: Googler)

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#174

Post by mritchie712 »

civilitty wrote: post #73

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills: Reddit is on CommonCrawl, which means its all available without API access, permanently from AWS’s CDN. These discussions are completely moot because the path of least resistance was already available and in use by OpenAI

Good call, but is upvote / downvote data in there? I'd imagine OpenAI is doing something with that.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#175

Post by keyringlight »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #144
eggbrain wrote: post #42

I think from Reddit's perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I'm sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took: - The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years - The "goodwill" that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data - Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to thei…

Why are they overlooking their biggest value as an organization is to sell limited truth to AIbros who want the _true_ up/down vote information, rather than the fake number they decide to provide to the plebians?

One thing that's struck me which I assume only reddit has, is the social graph data which holds all the relationships trends on who votes on what/who. There's limits on that based on how pseudoanonymous it is and the ease of making new accounts, but that seems valuable (at least to an outsider), although possibly in a "fighting yesterday's war" way as 'true' social networks like Facebook get value out of posts, which would be different to the way ML training may value it.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#176

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #170
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is going outside though. In fact, I think talking in person is usually a much better way of actually understanding someone else's opinion, because normative rules of social behaviour tend to stop the discussion from becoming a flamewar. I could spend hours just neutrally asking someone questions about a particular view they hold, why they hold it, etc. I think you gain a lot more insight into how people think this…

Who cares about "particular views they hold"? We're talking about fridge or tv brands, not some personal stuff.

>Who cares

I do.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#177

Post by tomrod »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #63
zdragnar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search. The provenance of information is just as important as the resulting information for pretty much anything I search for. I almost never accept a single search result as authoritative unless I'm pretty familiar with the source. Reddit in particular seems like a terrible set of training data. Pretty much any opinion is going to have a counter-opinion somewhere in…

> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search If you're good at googling the flow is: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > Figure out how to dismiss the cookies gate without accepting the cookies > Dismiss the google login box > Dismiss the popover pushing you to install an app > Scroll the page or ctrl+F to find the answer With ChatGPT it's just type your question and your answ…

It lies like crazy on surprising things. Database parameters for an enterprise provider, for example, I've seen hallucination in 5% of cases. That's _bad_ when its taken as authoritative.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#178

Post by rjh29 »

chess_horse_L wrote: post #171
rjh29 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook an…

To be fair, I found the best alternatives are just friends, and Twitter. In Twitter you can follow people whose content you find useful. If you're a Blender user, for example, you can follow 5 Blender tech artists and your feed will be now full of cool tips and art. With friends, with more or less the same skillset and hobbies as you have, you can ask them whatever you wanna ask. Heck, you'll learn a lot from them wi…

I like my friends a lot but we don't always agree. With reddit I can read like 5 opinions of a game I want to play and I can instantly feel like "this person doesn't like it and their reasons are similar to things that I don't like too" and make an informed opinion.

The point you make about "professionals don't have time to use Reddit" definitely applies though. /r/synthesizers for example is a great sub if you want to spend thousands on hardware. Not so good for making real music! Although I do feel like there are a lot of Unity game devs on there. Maybe you just need the right community.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#179

Post by rjh29 »

jmye wrote: post #135
rjh29 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook an…

Literally anything else. Having seen the general/highly upvoted Reddit opinions on things I have domain expertise in, and having seen the outsized effect that angry subs can have on media opinions, there is absolutely nothing I trust on Reddit at face value or without having interacted in very small subs long enough to know who has useful opinions. The only consistently good advice I see on Reddit is "call a local ex…

Don't look at highly upvoted opinions. Look for barely upvoted opinions of everyday users and aggregate them.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#180

Post by duxup »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #163
duxup wrote: post #64

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches? Is it? When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations. Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic. For e…

My experience in the past 5-10 years on Reddit is: - the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth. - the users can be very easily gamed in comments to vote one way or another just by the initial voting being negative or positive (aka most just vote with the trend) - the opinions all come from a bias of urban and major metro area people. It's painfully obvious they don't understand any mi…

> the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth

Probably the best example is legal type advice.

Personal example: The whole situation with internet archive and their e-book lending process. I was vocal that they didn’t have a leg to stand on and would lose. The comment was just about the legal situation.

I was downvoted to hell for that opinion and identified as some sort of book publisher advocate/ internet archive hater. As was anyone else predicting a loss or just raising questions.

Personally I love the internet archive, but I didn’t think they had a chance at winning.

But go by the comments and it was a slam dunk win because of some idea of “freedom” the comments and voters had. And yet they lost the lawsuit…

Interestingly, here on HN the response seem to be a generally more balanced. That’s not an endorsement of HN all the time, but it was an interesting contrast.

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