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GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

ybrikman.com

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Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#2
Pay per crawl of StackOverflow wouldn't encourage me to post more on StackOverflow. (Not that I was anyway.) Presumably you'd need to pay content creators, but that seems quite inefficient:

1. I pay OpenAI 2. OpenAI rev shares to StackOverflow 3. StackOverflow mostly keeps that money, but shares some with me for posting 4. I get some money back to help pay OpenAI?

This is nonsense. And if the frontier labs are right about simulated data, as Tesla seems to have been right with its FSD simulated visualization stack, does this really matter anyway? The value I get from an LLM far exceeds anything I have ever received from SO or an O'Reilly book (as much as I genuinely enjoy them collecting dust on a shelf).

If the argument is "fairness," I can sympathize but then shrug. If the argument is sustainability of training, I'm skeptical we need these payment models. And if the argument is about total value creation, I just don't buy it at all.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#3
We’ve seen decades of growing wage gaps and erosion of labors strength. The current elites don’t really care to enrich the people. Why would they care to do anything about this problem? They likely don’t see it as a problem at all.

If they did actually stumble on AGI (assuming it didn’t eat them too) it would be used by a select few to enslave or remove the rest of us.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#4
The article feels very confused to me.

Example 1 is bad, StackOverflow had clearly plateaued and was well into the downward freefall by the time ChatGPT was released.

Example 2 is apparently "open source" but it's actually just Tailwind which unfortunately had a very susceptible business model.

And I don't really think the framing here that it's eating its own tail makes sense.

It's also confusing to me why they're trying to solve the problem of it eating its own tail - there's a LOT of money being poured into the AI companies. They can try to solve that problem.

What I mean is - a snake eating its own tail is bad for the snake. It will kill it. But in this case the tail is something we humans valued and don't want eaten, regardless of the health of the snake. And the snake will probably find a way to become independent of the tail after it ate it, rather than die, which sucks for us if we valued the stuff the tail was made of, and of course makes the analogy totally nonsensical.

The actual solutions suggested here are not related to it eating its own tail anyway. They're related to the sentiment that the greed of AI companies needs to be reeled in, they need to give back, and we need solutions to the fact that we're getting spammed with slop.

I guess the last part is the part that ties into it "eating its own tail", but really, why frame it that way? Framing it that way means it's a problem for AI companies. Let's be honest and say it's a problem for us and we want it solved for our own reasons.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#5
post #2

Pay per crawl of StackOverflow wouldn't encourage me to post more on StackOverflow. (Not that I was anyway.) Presumably you'd need to pay content creators, but that seems quite inefficient: 1. I pay OpenAI 2. OpenAI rev shares to StackOverflow 3. StackOverflow mostly keeps that money, but shares some with me for posting 4. I get some money back to help pay OpenAI? This is nonsense. And if the frontier labs are right…

>If the argument is sustainability of training, I'm skeptical we need these payment models.

That seems to be the argument: LLM adoption leads to drop of organic training data, leading LLMs to eventually plateau, and we'll be left without the user-generated content we relied on for a while (like SO) and with subpar LLM. That's what I'm getting from the article anyway.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#7

The article feels very confused to me. Example 1 is bad, StackOverflow had clearly plateaued and was well into the downward freefall by the time ChatGPT was released. Example 2 is apparently "open source" but it's actually just Tailwind which unfortunately had a very susceptible business model. And I don't really think the framing here that it's eating its own tail makes sense. It's also confusing to me why they're t…

“Well, Reddit is growing, which contradicts my point, but I really feel like it’s not”

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#9

The article feels very confused to me. Example 1 is bad, StackOverflow had clearly plateaued and was well into the downward freefall by the time ChatGPT was released. Example 2 is apparently "open source" but it's actually just Tailwind which unfortunately had a very susceptible business model. And I don't really think the framing here that it's eating its own tail makes sense. It's also confusing to me why they're t…

The proposed solution is also pretty confused:

  > For each response, the GenAI tool lists the sources from which it extracted that content, perhaps formatted as a list of links back to the content creators, sorted by relevance, similar to a search engine
This literally isn’t possible given the architecture of transformer models and there’s no indication it will ever be.
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