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Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

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Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#191

Post by comfypotato »

nologic01 wrote: post #154
comfypotato wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the bottom line is that Microsoft’s (and thus other for-profit AI initiatives) stance is that any and all data is fair game regardless of license or authorization. This results, in their opinion, from the fact that the AI alters the data, changes the output, and is otherwise “inspired” by the data in the same way an artist might be inspired by another without copyright infringement.

This sounds very dodgy. Will somebody be checking the degree of such "data alteration" and verify that the "AI" is actually inspired rather than copying? To me this feels like its opening up the door for the elimination of copyright as any algorithmic layer interjected between scrapped data and end users could claim to be "inspired".

Welcome to the discussion lol. People have already provided examples of copilot producing niche code verbatim thereby proving their intuition incorrect. It’s a whole mess that will take years to be cleaned up by new legal conventions.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#192

Post by rcxdude »

choas wrote: post #188
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…

- suddenly after the ChatGPT success, they realized that they have valuable data - next step is to stop third-party apps that generated these data - then they let the moderators show their power I’m not sure if people care about a CEO being exposed as a liar nowadays, but maybe some former Yahoo managers have another idea on how to destroy more value.

Indeed. Their API changes make very little sense if the goal is to capture the value that content they host has for training LLMs, especially because I don't think there's much value that they can capture there (AI researchers argue that using the content is fair use, and they can simply scrape it if they don't have API access: something which the courts have allowed in similar cases)

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#193

Post by piyh »

tmpz22 wrote: post #145
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…

> Reddit is usually not the place to go for expert discourse Its not expert research but Reddit can be used to find probably-real-first-hand-experience on a given subject. Which is enough to prefix "reddit" to a lot of google searches. It just needs to be a marginal improvement to Google blogspam for it to have some intrinsic value.

Also really depends on what kind of experts you're looking for. 99.99% of the world's experts are not writing in trade publications or scientific journals.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#194

Post by LordDragonfang »

choas wrote: post #188
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…

- suddenly after the ChatGPT success, they realized that they have valuable data - next step is to stop third-party apps that generated these data - then they let the moderators show their power I’m not sure if people care about a CEO being exposed as a liar nowadays, but maybe some former Yahoo managers have another idea on how to destroy more value.

>former Yahoo managers

Specifically the ones that ended up in charge of tumblr, so they can suggest "ban adult content on a platform famous for its adult content"

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#195

Post by dmazin »

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

I need to stress this more obviously in the article, but the goal is to protect Reddit's future data.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#196

Post by telotortium »

joot82 wrote: post #94
kajaktum wrote: post #84

They can still scrap the website? The fact is that many, many internet businesses today not make sense. Many of them are bleeding money with no possible path to profitability ahead. Mostly due to the fact that people's expectations are very different and I would argue even skewed. Clearly hosting Reddit is expensive, but who really pays for it? People don't like ads, don't like to pay for services, don't like to be r…

They know hardly anyone would pay for a social link aggregator and discussion board, but some people might donate a coffee to a beloved app developer on their phone. Hence the only way forward in their mind to charge for API calls. Even if it kills many of those apps, some will suck it up and charge their users. That it makes life harder for LLM competition and benefits their guy Sam is just a nice side effect. But I…

Then Reddit the company should charge Apollo a reasonable price, not an extortionate price that will kill the apps altogether. And lay off the majority of the staff, just like Twitter. Sure, the experience may get slightly worse, but it will be fine. The real issue is just trying to take Reddit to IPO.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#197

Post by lisasays »

gsatic wrote: post #169
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…

Google or Reddit don't matter, if the Info Explosion problem that the Internet produced gets solved some other way. Main reason such sites came into existence was there was too much info on the Internet. These sites where attempts at simplifying the numerous websites and blogs ppl had to manually discover and track. They have meandered around that problem, and got totally distracted by all kinds of other problems (ma…

If the Info Explosion problem that the Internet produced gets solved some other way.

Sure it will - asymptotically.

But it took 18 years to grow Reddit. Even if a solid alternative emerges in a fraction of that time -- that's still a multi-year gap. Plus we're at a significant knowledge deficit (for us lowly humans, never mind LLMs) if Reddit's archives don't re-emerge sometime soon.

(Google search has been braindead for some time now -- so we can leave that source out of the equation).

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#198

Post by kasunbuddhi »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#199

Post by jedberg »

mbmjertan wrote: post #172
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…

> and given that Tencent is a major shareholder in Reddit

Snoop Dogg owns more of reddit than Tencent. The Tencent investment is very overblown.

Re: Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

#200

Post by hospitalJail »

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…

>You'd usually be better off training on trade publications, scientific journals, or fandom than Reddit.

Bold claim.

There are plenty of engineers and doctors on reddit answering nuanced questions that arent talked about in any journals.

That is what is missing. The absurdly specific stuff that reddit gets. Sure you can answer with nonsense that sounds realistic, but you could also answer with the exact text that solved the problem in the past.

Its the difference between asking the question "How do I save money at the grocery store?" and getting generic answers like "Make a budget" and getting specific answers like "Buy fresh rather than processed".

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