In February 2024, Reddit struck a $60 million deal with Google to let the search giant use data on the platform to train its artificial intelligence models. Notably absent from the discussions were Reddit users, whose data were being sold. The deal reflected the reality of the modern internet: Big tech companies own virtually all our online data and get to decide what to do with that data. Unsurprisingly, many platforms monetize their data, and the fastest-growing way to accomplish that today is to sell it to AI companies, who are themselves massive tech companies using the data to train […]

On April 22, 2022, I received an out-of-the-blue text from Sam Altman inquiring about the possibility of training GPT-4 on O’Reilly books. We had a call a few days later to discuss the possibility. As I recall our conversation, I told Sam I was intrigued, but with reservations. I explained to him that we could only license our data if they had some mechanism for tracking usage and compensating authors. I suggested that this ought to be possible, even with LLMs, and that it could be the basis of a participatory content economy for AI. (I later wrote about this […]

Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place. The company seeks to minimize costs while meeting a 23 percent increase in demand. Wouldn’t it be easier for the company to just ask ChatGPT to come up with an optimal plan? In fact, for all their incredible capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often perform […]