Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
I 100% can see it easily selling for that much.
You want to know why it's worth that much?
Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which is the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.
Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?
5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.
Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody's just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying "boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don't have to force an intern to scrape it for us".
Scraped data isn't legal to resell, scraping isn't even legal in the first place.
Just because you can scrape the data doesn't mean it's worth anything.
Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.
If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.
So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.
And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?
If they literally own the original data themselves
Scraping is legal
Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?
The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.
All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).
It's too late to say with complete certainty that it's all legal (the appeal processes haven't all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it's going to turn out not to be legal, it's very clear that nobody's shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it's been happening for years.
Everything you've written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).
NYT hasn't actually won that case yet, so it's pointless to bring up. OpenAI has publicly stated that NYT heavily has misrepresented their findings.
OpenAI's value would plummet and crash if they gained a reputation for using illegal material to train their AI on, investors would drop them so fast.
This is just a simple fact. LLM providers reputation is heavily staked on the legality of their data.
So far the courts have ruled in these companies favor.
But it's extremely likely illegaly scraped Dara from reddit would not pass the sniff test and debestate an offending companies reputation.
If you don't understand why, you have to do some brushing up on why these LLM services are worth so much and who is using them and for what. Once you understand that, it becomes extremely apparent why legally owning the entire history of every reddit post ever would be extremely valuable, and why a 5bil price tag is actually not that crazy.