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Comment by cferry | Hacker News Reader

My belief is that the AI business is all about data collection. The value isn't so much in the quality of the models (that's what enterprise customers and developers pay to get), but in the amount of data that comes "for free" to whoever hosts the models. And then it's worth whoever buys it thinks it is, like insurers or advertisers.

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"My belief is the AI business is all about data collection."

The "business" of so-called "tech" companies is all about data collection

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most...

It’s because they’re all in bed with the Government who wants the same thing. Think of them as an extension of the NSA/CIA and the byproduct of the data collection is being able to sell Ads to make money.

If thats the case why dont they just pay me for it directly.

My guess: people would ask way more for that kind of information. That's why it's a totally immoral business: making people give away something they would never agree to give for free, if they were truly aware of it.

Because the concepts of freedom and security are not universal.

We're way past just collecting for a while now.

it's more like knowledge extraction at this point. younger generations don't build up knowledge any more, everyone else is slowly losing their knowledge by not using it.

Eventually the rug pull comes and knowledge will only be accessible by those who can afford it.

Up until ~2 weeks ago, I believed that at least opting out of data collection would protect me. I no longer do.

Everyone knows that fines paid by companies (instead of the people making the decisions) are considered simply a cost of doing business. A probabilistic tax, if you will.

What finally dawned on me is that given they need more and more data to train bigger and bigger models, at some point the value of using my data for training will exceed the cost of getting caught using it without/against my consent.

There's no escape unless we change the law.

Yeah I was wondering how long it would take for a browser company to do something like this. It lets them scrape data without having to deal with anti-scraping provisions on websites, since now their training data collection gets spread across the entire Chrome userbase and they're able to offload the work of bypassing the Cloudflare captchas or whatever to their end users.

Google doesn't need to that because Google is not affected by any anti-scraping provisions, every website literally begs Google to get scraped.

When you use a coding model running on someone else's computer, you're giving an AI company your proprietary source code and associated documentation, and you're giving free training examples to make a future AI model better equipped to eliminate your job. Valuable data indeed.

Which is why it is odd to see so many companies jumping on the bandwagon, even those that have always been super protective of their oh so valuable proprietary internal code.

Next quarter thinking

Exactly. This is what people don't seem to get. LLMs ("AI") are not a tool for us. They are a tool for the owner class and a replacement for us.

> My belief is that the AI business is all about data collection.

In the short term, maybe. That's what you tell investors.

In the long term, it's about altering, shaping, and even constructing reality: making a new and canonical truth for humanity where the ruling classes are invisible to us and the machine that tells us our history and bedtime stories and how we feel is in every device we carry, until it is everywhere, and it has always been everywhere, and it will always be everywhere.

100% and if you have data other model providers can't 'scrape' (e.g. Google access to Chrome user/usage data) you're in a better position to win.

Yes. It is seriously not a coincidence that all of the ai companies are now offense contractors for the department of war. It's also not a coincidence they want to ban vpns, and force people to verify themselves with IDs, biometrics and their phones for all of their activities. Meanwhile... Bots can run free.

Surveillance capitalism is so stupid.

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