Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 152 posts

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#111

Post by acid__ »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #36
htrp wrote: post #2

>Rates vary by buyer and content type, but Braga said companies are generally willing to pay $1 to $2 per image, $2 to $4 per short-form video and $100 to $300 per hour of longer films. The market rate for text is $0.001 per word, she added. This is high enough that there should be a market to compensate the end users who created these

> The market rate for text is $0.001 per word, she added. I'm astonished that a picture turns out to be worth a thousand words.

Top multimodal models have about 200-1000 tokens per image, so the math works out.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#112

Post by dleink »

passion__desire wrote: post #110
bilsbie wrote: post #60

I wonder if they’ve considered hiring people to write. A lot of people might do it for cheap just to have their imprint on AI. Or another twist pay people to submit ten years of emails (upload the backup file) or just pay small amounts for works they’ve made. College essays, journals, etc.

This won't be necessary in future AIs. As AIs will start aligning tokens from all the rich modalities of audio, video, 3D with text so that they can express complex ideas, they will bootstrap in proper language generation. I don't think college essays, etc would contain anything novel. Future techniques could smoothly interpolate better creating ever-anew wordmud.

> I don't think [things created by humans] would contain anything novel.

That's quite a proposition.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#113

Post by nicklecompte »

lukas099 wrote: post #109
vlovich123 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are probably pretty arbitrarily priced so someone thought they'd be cute & everyone else picked up this rate.

I don't think market prices usually work this way. Am I missing a reason that this is an exception?

I would think classical mechanisms of price determination don't really make sense when there's a brand new market: customers don't know how much things "should" cost and businesses can't make decisions via comparison to competitors. So there is some arbitrariness in setting the initial prices - you can't do market research without an established market.

This is especially true with these data brokers, since it's not like "cost of materials and labor + a profit margin" makes sense. In this particular case data is more like a new commodity than a manufactured good.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#114

Post by JohnFen »

Terr_ wrote: post #61
dnissley wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the end result is ai chat agents that anyone in the world can access for free, that seems like an absolutely wonderful thing

> for free Even if a future service doesn't have an obvious charge or subscription, just because you don't recognize how you're being exploited doesn't mean it's truly "free." There's a reason advertising exists as an industry at all, let alone a global trillion-dollar one. Today's "free" is actually paid for by exploiting user attention and attempting to hack your brain--sometimes in ways that are culturally accepte…

Yes. If a thing is being paid by the collection of user data (which is what advertising involves in these sorts of use cases), then it's not free in any meaningful sense. You're still paying, just using a different medium of exchange.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#115

Post by nicklecompte »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #20
layer8 wrote: post #6

This will be a fun reminiscence once we find out how humans are able to learn with just a tiny fraction of that data volume.

The real difference with human learning is feedback: when young humans learn, at least some of the time they are interacting with intelligent agents that are able to give them focused feedback on their recent inputs and initial reactions to them.

I think this ignores the most essential feedback very young humans get: planet Earth itself obeys laws of physics, mathematics, logic, etc. And by age 2 human children already have far faster and deeper reasoning abilities than any contemporary AI, even if their lack of linguistic knowledge means they wouldn't perform very well on LLM benchmarks.

In general AI researchers have done a very bad job exploring how a system might be "near-human" according to some fancy linguistic benchmark, yet dramatically dumber than a pigeon in terms of general reasoning abilities.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#116

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

mateo1 wrote: post #102
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like how ads have integrated into everything, trying to get us to click away from the happy path, AI will be in everything, trying to get us to do things that it is not yet good at so that it can learn from us. Which would be fine if the newfound efficiencies were properly democratized.

Yep. All these tech giants are taking the labour that people provided to the world in good faith in what I've seen described as a gift economy, and trying to lock it up. On the internet for the longest time people were providing their knowledge and fruits of labour for free, anticipating reciprocity (which on average they got). They stopped when reciprocity stopped. Platforms would monetize their efforts, control the…

Do you have a concrete example of something you're afraid of loosing access to? The examples that come to my mind are such that cutting people off from them would degrade the relevance of the AI that's trained on them, but maybe I'm overlooking something.

Like, if you prevent access to research in order to protect the moat around your AI product, you'll harm the research community that would otherwise be your users. So now they're looking for other jobs and you have no users.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#118

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

qeternity wrote: post #55
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can be forgiven for not having foreseen how social media would be used against us, connecting the world sounded like a cool idea on the surface. But having gone through that there's no excuse to be naive and simplistic about AI.

What harm has been inflicted upon you directly as a result?

The worst downsides of social media weren't apparent or even necessarily occurring yet until we were well into it by more than just the first few years.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#119

Post by cdme »

spxneo wrote: post #107
cdme wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole notion that AI can replace search is nonsense. It yields no benefit to the creators of the results it scrapes and the models hallucinate. It's worse for users and it's worse for everyone producing anything of note online.

but many chatgpt users are not using Google as much instead relying on LLMs + RAG ChatGPT is the new search engine and provides far more value to the end user than Google. The issue seems to be people want a payout from OpenAI...but its non-profit

It's a shiny toy — it'll yield worse answers. Much like Google's own AI.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#120

Post by smegger001 »

passion__desire wrote: post #108
jsheard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the companies making those agents are paying top dollar for training data then the product isn't going to be truly free, at best it will be "free" with caveats. Do you want to use an AI agent which is fine-tuned according to the wishes of the top bidding advertisers? Because that's probably the first thing they'll try to make "free" chatbots actually turn a profit. The future is having your own personal AI assista…

As Yuval Harari suggests the AI economy will move away from money and man power. What will be important are control over resources and their distribution. These big companies won't care about a number in some database. They won't care about selling stuff to you, maybe in the midterm but not in the long run.

that sounds good until you realize that money is just an abstraction of resources.
Post reply on HN