12 ms·

Reddit is OpenAI’s moat

286 points by dmazin 3y ago

TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
This article misses the mark for me. It wields reddit as meaningful source of openAI's performance, and then goes down a rabbit hole from there. OpenAI's moat is the thousands of 'human in the loop' contractors that they hired in south america... for years... Not reddit...
csdvrx 3y ago
It would make a lot of sense for Microsoft to buy reddit: a curated source of data is the perfect moat! They could come as a white knight, restoring the API access but for apps only, conveniently blocking competitors while satisfying the users.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Heh... and take responsibility for all the porn and various "degeneracy" on there? It makes them a perfect political punching bag.
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    They could claim remaining true to the original spirit or whatever excuse will fly. How many billions will AI be worth in the future? What's the cost of the potential reputation damage for having a edgy brand? All that matters is the operation can be expected to be profitable. Better: what would be the synergies between the xbox audience and the reddit audience? The "degenerates" are clients like any others, maybe also with more disposable income.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    "We recognize the value online communities provide in training the state of the art in generative AI. With that in mind, we have acquired Reddit and intend to operate it as a wholly owned subsidiary. After an exhaustive search, we've selected $adult_ceo_with_social_experience to lead the team as they work to ensure Reddit can continue to operate as both a safe and vibrant digital oasis, where people can come together to share their interests and passions." One might argue these communities are too valuable to generative AI to allow them to flail under current substandard management.
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      "Let's now show the new Bing, where high quality data from reddit is better ranked and the selected by default for {whatever_category_you_think_matters} thanks to automatic classification of the search questions by GPT" There are many synergies that aren't properly considered by a naive take. I use site:reddit.com with most of my queries. I now prefer bing to google. Bing market share is growing. Coughing up a few B to avoid reddit going on with an IPO would be a very strategic move on many fronts.
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Github acquisition was a savvy, Reddit has more peril involved but similar value.
        csdvrx 3y ago
        I'm in full agreement, but I see an even better integration in other product lines (mostly gaming and search) Also, Microsoft doesn't have a generic social network to mine data from. They may prefer to stick to the professional world, but then acquiring a few high value sites just to close their API would be another move. How much $$$ do you think it would take for YC to say "hell yes!" to put HN under Microsoft control? How valuable would it be to add a few conditions like a very generous giveaway of azure credits to HN companies in return of exclusivity (no more S3 or google cloud for the new batch!)
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        > They may prefer to stick to the professional world, but then acquiring a few high value sites just to close their API would be another move. They already have LinkedIn, which is far more valuable than HN for this purpose.
        csdvrx 3y ago
        Yes, Linkedin is a professional social network, but no, you will not find high quality content there. There's a lot of value for keeping in touch with the zeitgeist (ex: sqlite innovations, llama etc) and finding new trends on HN There's about 0 value from using linkedin.
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    The model will be aligned anyway, the internet is full of porn and degeneracy, not just Reddit.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  They have no desire for the political risk of running a non-professional social media as a major government contractor.
- kyleyeats 3y ago
  This is so smart that I'm now convinced it's what's happening.
behnamoh 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if ClosedAI closed yet another part of their product, in this case, the training data itself.
blovescoffee 3y ago
Except Google and Microsoft/Bing search engines have already cached lots of that data just to provide their service. Facebook has its own treasure trove. Apple less so but they're also the least competitive in the AI space (of the FAANG) atm.
- dmbche 3y ago
  I'm no expert on corporate law, but maybe them aquiring reddit data makes that data illegal to use for others to train their models on? Even if available, if it's not legal to use the big guys can't touch it.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    OpenAI's trying to argue that line, but given that most of OpenAI's models are trained on scraped data that they had no legal right to other than existing court precedents on scraped public data, they don't have much of a leg to stand on.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    If AI can be trained on copyrighted works without issue I don't see how an argument could be made against using reddit data for training.
corry 3y ago
Could OpenAI acquire Reddit as an alternative to their IPO? Let's say it's worth $10B - quite a sum especially if OpenAI is 'only' worth $40B - $50B. But a world in which compute isn't a moat, LLMs aren't a moat... but real human-generated content IS a moat... maybe it could make sense?
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  $10b is probably too low
- gwd 3y ago
  I mean, that would be kind of insane, but it could actually work: OpenAI needs "clean", high-quality data as input for its AI; rather than harvesting data to sell to advertisers, they could and finance major internet infrastructure -- the equivalents of StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook -- to harvest data to feed their models. That might actually make the world a better place.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Why would you pay $10B for data which you can scrape for $50 from a few seedboxes? Or if that's too much work for you, just download one of them many archives that are already freely available online.
jtode 3y ago
[flagged]
- NamTaf 3y ago
  a16z is Andreessen Horowitz, which is trivially discoverable via your search engine of choice since it's also their website, https://a16z.com/ https://a16z.com/ They're a major VC firm
- mabbo 3y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- flapjaxy 3y ago
  It's Andreessen Horowitz's VC firm https://a16z.com/ https://a16z.com/
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Andreessen Horowitz is probably the most famous VC firm in Silicon Valley…
  - jtode 3y ago
    Well, my downvotes are well deserved, asking such a question here.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      If you were just asking a question you probably wouldn't have been downvoted though…
      - jtode 3y ago
        You're right, I was railing against in-slang, if we're interrogating my actual statement. I understand why people use it on platforms like twitter; everywhere else it's like saying "ell oh ell" to me after I tell a joke.
JimtheCoder 3y ago
I may be in the minority here, but if I want the opinion of Redditors on an issue, I will use a search engine to look for it specifically, thus knowing the provenance of the information I am receiving. I don't really want the corpus of Reddit data influencing the output of a generative AI model...because it's Reddit, after all... Even though I am pretty sure it is already included in the training dataset already... I could be wrong, though...
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Reddits community is passive aggressive, thinks it’s really smart, loves memes. I certainly hope OpenAI doesn’t view it at as some kind of a source of truth
  - rchaud 3y ago
    You just described the C-suite at most SV companies.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    No, they view it as a language model. You can tell lies with the same language that you can tell truth with. If you want truth, you don't want language, you want references to reviewed work. You also want things like 'show your work' chains of though. These are really different things. If I tell GPT "make up a story" I don't want it coming back and saying, sorry I can only tell the truth.
- moron4hire 3y ago
  Seriously hope OpenAI is stripping all the canned meme replies that go on for hundreds of sub threads and end up as the top comments in threads before they train their models. How would you even do that reliably?
  - jononor 3y ago
    Label data and build a meme classifier? Does not have to be perfect to be useful. But yeah, data curation is probably a huge endeavor at the companies making Language model that are fit for production. Like in practically all applications of Machine Learning. But the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is also one of the key tools to getting useful outputs.
meowface 3y ago
I'm sure I'm missing something, but: aren't there publicly available corpuses of all reddit posts up to a certain date? Why wouldn't researchers train with these? Are they just not recent enough? Even if they aren't very recent, how big of a deal is that when it comes to training models that presumably use lots of other data sources as well?
- dathinab 3y ago
  > up to a certain date? > just not recent enough thats a very big deal for a lot of the content you find on reddit which users might want to get answers from from an AI.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  There are massive up to date archives available https://tracker.archiveteam.org/reddit/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/reddit/ I guess either OP doesn't know about them or he assumes that AI researchers won't think of using them.
- mattstir 3y ago
  Basically the only thing that comes to mind is that our collective views and knowledge about topics can change over time. If we had a hypothetical LLM in the 1930's, it would have had quite different views on things like mental health, civil rights, and so on. But like you said, the models would ideally be trained on many other data sources as well.
- LittleShaman 3y ago
  The author is aware of that, mentions it towards the end: > Most of Reddit’s current data has been scraped anyway, so the game is to protect Reddit’s data going forward. But yes, Pushshift archives of all posts and comments until the recent ban [1] are freely available for download [2] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/135tdl2/a_response_from_pushshift_a_call_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/135tdl2/a_respon... The ban was followed by allowing the parent non-profit of Pushshift (Network Contagion Research Institute) to use the API provided access is restricted to a use-case Reddit has care for: mod tools. Reddit hasnt replaced those with its own just yet. The rest of us are shut out. [2] https://academictorrents.com/userdetails.php?id=9863 https://academictorrents.com/userdetails.php?id=9863
victor22 3y ago
100% Open AI is already making fake AI-generated posts and comments in reddit for a while. Pack it up boys, internet ran by humans is over.
- flandre 3y ago
  Should've packed it up back in usenet days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney Also, if reddit is in any dataset of these models then it's no wonder that I'm not intrigued by artificial """intelligence""" at all.
  - denverllc 3y ago
    Looking at the examples discussing Reagan on the Wiki page, is this generated text looking to sway public opinion? This could be used to sway elections! What sort of precautions did the hacker named Mark V Shaney take before releasing this into the wild? These so called “Mark Off Chains” are too dangerous to be let into the wild. They should only be made available to the largest corporations who can protect us from their dangers. I’m going to write my senator to make sure this isn’t made publicly available!
bzmrgonz 3y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with this ... and given Microsoft's trail of corporate bodies in its wake.. I wouldn't put it passed them to be orchestrating the cutting of all data-lakes for AI training, especially a clean and pre-processed source like Reddit. if data is water that corporations drink(which it is).. REDDIT is like finding a naturally occurring spring of Perrier water(by natural, I mean, we are the ants who bring this water one drop at a time from the soft petals of plants which collect the night dew).
- Weryj 3y ago
  I would like to be compensated for the digital oil I've produced.
  - c22 3y ago
    You can be compensated the same way we compensate the earth for real oil: by burning your output to create a toxic environment for you to exist in.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  This is much more YC/VC maneuvering than it is Microsoft.
rileywatkins 3y ago
It’s a fun thought experiment, but I tend to revert to the simpler explanation: They’re cutting off third party apps to increase their control over the user experience, to show more ads. The relationship with OpenAI might also be a thing, but I think it’s the ad numbers they need to juice for their IPO.
- dmazin 3y ago
  I think that explanation certainly the simpler one (and thus more believable), but one thing that stands out to me is that Reddit's ads are really bad. I don't know how much of a business it is. I think the value as a corpus is much greater. If I owned both Reddit and OpenAI, I'd prioritize OpenAI since its upside is bigger. Of course, I think another good explanation is that, OpenAI aside, Reddit simply wants to get paid for their data, which they now realize is valuable. Scraping aside, that might be the real goal here.
williamcotton 3y ago
When Reddit goes public and certain executives give preferential treatment to another corporation due to closed door deals they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit from their shareholders.
skilled 3y ago
This might as well be as good place as any to say that I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years time we find out that the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft was also done in OpenAI's favor. I know it's probably a crazy theory, but it did cross my mind a few months ago.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Doesn't make any sense timeline wise, business execs at Microsoft were probably not thinking seriously about openai at the time
- kirubakaran 3y ago
  The really impressive feat here is not even that, but MS inventing time travel to acquire Github before OpenAI was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eyes
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    OpenAI certainly existed in 2018 but I don't think I noticed most people being aware of them outside of the industry.
    - kirubakaran 3y ago
      You’re right, my bad, I misremembered the Github acquisition year
fullshark 3y ago
If they then run the site at a loss and optimize it for ingesting well structured training data to their models it might become decent again. Basically what Stack Overflow was trying to become but its users rebelled.
deafpolygon 3y ago
The data Reddit has on its NSFW content (you know which one.. yes, the pornographic one) must be worth millions. No, no... jeez, you pervs... not the content. The upvote/downvote data for every image will probably train any generative AI on exactly what makes a good porn video/pic - and we all know sex sells. The dirty comments, and etc. On top of that, they'd make really useful leverage if you can connect any one of these accounts to their real world counterparts. I bet an AI with a large enough dataset could make short work of that.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  >The data Reddit has on its NSFW content (you know which one.. yes, the pornographic one) must be worth millions. Blackmailing people who participated in /r/jailbait? I would bump that up a 0 or two. Sorry, just thinking about how an AI would go about acquiring resources. Please tell me that admin guy wasn't part of that.
cfcf14 3y ago
Some strange claims in this post. The reddit post datasets are already 'out there' in the wild, and I'm fairly certain every other major LLM release has used their data. Also - did Midjourney "steal" DALLE-2's lunch? It's a restrictive service with essentially a discord-only based CLI.
eggbrain 3y ago
I think from Reddit's perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I'm sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took: - The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years - The "goodwill" that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data - Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to their sites via Google (e.g. site:reddit.com), that is now available instantly (and customized) via ChatGPT Despite Reddit's probably closer connections to OpenAI than other startups through Y-Combinator and Sam Altman, I wonder how keen they are to actually work with a company that potentially destroyed a ton of their value, right before they were ready to IPO.
- skilled 3y ago
  I agree with you but not in entirety. This comment from spez[0] about blaming the API price changes on LLM's is too far fetched. A lot of commenters here on HN have already pointed that out already too. Unless they build a literal brick wall (paywall) around the site, that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. You could get it down to a science where you only scrape any new data whenever you train the next model. [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnk9izp/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
  - ltadeut 3y ago
    > , that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. How would that work from a legal perspective, though? Let's say there's no paywall and Reddit's terms of use disallow unauthorized commercial use of their data. Wouldn't that be a violation of Reddit's terms and liable to some legal procedure?
    - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
      It is OpenAI's and Microsoft's position that obtaining, using for training, and displaying data via AI is fair use.
rytheturtle 3y ago
people won’t care about Reddit’s internal governance policy when researching mattress toppers, but they will care about finding relevant, recent information. The gamble Reddit is taking is “do we think we can provide a competitive user experience and ecosystem without 3rd party developers?”. If the answer is yes, people will keep using and contributing to Reddit and it will remain a valuable source of information regardless of the lack of 3rd party apps. It could pay off, but if the Googles and Metas of the world just start offering AI training data as a product, it wouldn’t really benefit OpenAI if Reddit in particular locked down some older data at the expense of it’s user base. Time will tell if the move will work out for Reddit in the long term.
arijun 3y ago
I’m not sure exactly what the moat would be here—the current data is already probably available, and future data OpenAI will have to pay for just like everyone else. Ok, looking closer at the article I see > The important piece is that it’s easiest for OpenAI to get the data (given that companies with co-investors help each other) which seems like a pretty weak basis to form a moat (if Reddit IPOs as is their plan, sama’s influence will be not nearly as strong)
raincole 3y ago
(I know it's a satire) It's quite naive if someone think all the major tech big boys who have at least moderate ambitions about AI haven't already at least archived Wikipedia, Reddit and StackOverflow.
thrdbndndn 3y ago
> They could extend the June 30th deadline, which I think is likely. This would get rid of 3rd party apps while, perhaps, keeping most of the community intact. I don't get what the author is trying to say here. If the deadline was extended, why would it "get rid of 3rd party apps"? I assume because some (Apollo, RIF) said they're going to close anyway even if the deadline was extended? If so, the community will not be "intact". If the author think the death of 3rd party won't affect the community, then Reddit don't need to extend the deadline.
nightpool 3y ago
This post is wrong on several aspects the other commenters have already pointed out, but it raises this tangential point which I'm curious about "They could buy out more 3rd party clients, which would somewhat appease the community. This would be a terrible move IPO-wise." Why would this be a terrible move IPO wise? If Reddit has two major apps, one for casual users and one for power-users, and it has enough control to eventually put (tasteful) ads in both, how is that bad for their IPO? I don't think it's likely, given how much goodwill they've already burned with the community, but from a pure IPO perspective it seems like a solid go forward strategy
nostrademons 3y ago
The leaked Google memo "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" is instructive here: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne... Original author is an ML researcher, and the crux of his argument is that most weights in a LLM are significantly overdetermined. Once you have ingested several terabytes of natural language, you know how to generate natural language. The remaining misses are facts that it has never seen, usually because they are so obvious that nobody thinks to write them down explicitly. And so more training data doesn't necessarily help LLM performance, unless you're either ingesting either extremely basic facts that are so obvious most adult discourse overlooks them, or you're ingesting expert knowledge that's highly specific and only discussed in a few forums. Reddit data could perhaps help with the latter, but a.) Reddit is usually not the place to go for expert discourse and b.) there are other better sources of data for it. You'd usually be better off training on trade publications, scientific journals, or fandom than Reddit. Also the LLaMa/RedPajama approach makes this stupidly easy, because you can pass around patch sets to the model trained on specific mini-corpora, and then update the weights appropriately. Hence why the author of the Google memo believes neither Google nor OpenAI has a viable moat.
- bbor 3y ago
  This is a great analysis that really cleared up the impact of that memo for that me. You clearly know but for any readers who aren’t clear: that memo is the opinion of one engineer at google, and far from the (apparent) opinion of the relevant execs
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    It’s dead wrong, I suggest reading the original. _No one_ thinks models trained on more data would be about the same, since everything flows out of that premise…then throws Current Thing on top…it’s very unhelpful. The “patches” he refers to are LoRA and are treated as deus ex machina. They’re not, ex. playing with Stable Diffusion we can see they’re additive but they’re not nearly as good as training the original model on the data. (Disclaimer: Googler)
civilitty 3y ago
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills: Reddit is on CommonCrawl, which means its all available without API access, permanently from AWS’s CDN. These discussions are completely moot because the path of least resistance was already available and in use by OpenAI
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Thank you, I had no idea about that site
- mritchie712 3y ago
  Good call, but is upvote / downvote data in there? I'd imagine OpenAI is doing something with that.
- dmazin 3y ago
  I need to stress this more obviously in the article, but the goal is to protect Reddit's future data.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    Why would Reddit block CommonCrawl's access to future data?
- screye 3y ago
  Yeah, all the publicly available reddit data is freely available and the cat has been out of the bag for a while. Reddit has a lot of other private information though. The entire corpus of moderated / censored comments is the internet's best alignment dataset. The real upvote/downvote numbers make for perfect RLHF. Hell, Reddit could remove ads and replace them with paid RLHFing bots. Charge OpenAI money to selectively deploy AI bots to certain QA subreddits. All AI generated comments get deleted within a week. That way it doesn't lead to comment spam, but the bot still gets amazing upvote/downvote feedback and a ton of direct comment-reply feedback. 3rd party apps can't 'ad block' it either, since only Reddit knows which comments are fake. (psst, reddit, if you're gonna steal my idea, I want to be paid for it)
duxup 3y ago
> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches? Is it? When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations. Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic. For example the networking topics often were “small shop” focused and users unaware of very common enterprise level practices, and when they saw someone mention it they would react really poorly. The result was advice tailored to small shops that have limited staff, so you got ideas that “work” but would perform poorly at scale (at best) and at times could present security risks, miss opportunities where more performance was needed, better solutions were available with a sizable staff and planning. They weren’t wrong, but the answers were skewed. Subreddits are weird, they might be about a topic but the community often moves that topic/ has a specific pov within that topic… people without those views tend to abandon those subs and those who remain aren’t necessarily “right”. Reddit isn’t stack overflow where being correct is at least on the surface valued where we can run code and see if it works. Top answer on Reddit could be wrong and anyone taking issue with it may simply not answer. Heck there are whole subreddits dedicated to wallowing in misinformation… Now I don’t know if Q&A is the start and end of LLM training (not my area of expertise at all, I am open to the possibility that what I’m talking about isn’t a problem at all) but Reddit as a source makes me wonder what the results would be.
- rjh29 3y ago
  Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook and Discord are walled gardens. Quora is a shithole. The rest of the internet is blogspam and significantly more dubious than your average Reddit comment!
  - flandre 3y ago
    My favorite alternatives are email and going outside.
fnovd 3y ago
Maybe if reddit developed some expertise in using all of the user data they have to tag, categorize, annotate every comment, they would have something of value to provide. Their recent actions only angered users and won't stop future LLMs from using their data for the reasons many others here have noted.
kajaktum 3y ago
They can still scrap the website? The fact is that many, many internet businesses today not make sense. Many of them are bleeding money with no possible path to profitability ahead. Mostly due to the fact that people's expectations are very different and I would argue even skewed. Clearly hosting Reddit is expensive, but who really pays for it? People don't like ads, don't like to pay for services, don't like to be reminded that they can provide donations (Wikipedia). What else is there? Hoping the customers have the suddenly conscience to fund the product? I foresee many internet companies dying over the next few years with no real replacement to crop up. But people always forget and history repeats itself; so maybe we will just see an endless reincarnations of similarly failed products.
- joot82 3y ago
  They know hardly anyone would pay for a social link aggregator and discussion board, but some people might donate a coffee to a beloved app developer on their phone. Hence the only way forward in their mind to charge for API calls. Even if it kills many of those apps, some will suck it up and charge their users. That it makes life harder for LLM competition and benefits their guy Sam is just a nice side effect. But I'm pretty confident that there will be daily reddit dumps available for training very soon as Torrent for anyone that can't afford to hide their scraping, if they not already are.
  - telotortium 3y ago
    Then Reddit the company should charge Apollo a reasonable price, not an extortionate price that will kill the apps altogether. And lay off the majority of the staff, just like Twitter. Sure, the experience may get slightly worse, but it will be fine. The real issue is just trying to take Reddit to IPO.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Is hosting reddit hard? Or do they just have thousands of employees who have little reason to exist.
drumhead 3y ago
If Reddit is such a valuable property it would make sense for one of the big AI players to come in and buy it out before it IPOs and the value shoots through the roof. Open Ai is the most likely one given the links between Altman and the management. But a new entry like maybe Apple could swoop in. We know how useless the management of Reddit are at making money from it, a sale in it's entirety might be the best exit for the VCs and for them.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  >before it IPOs and the value shoots through the roof Maybe they want to wait for it to IPO and then drop 90% instead.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Reddit is valuable for its milk, but gave away the cow years ago with the free API.
ChumpGPT 3y ago
Couldn't OpenAI create it's own "Reddit" to farm and harvest? Seems like it would be easy with the resources they have and don't even attempt to reinvent it, just copy it.
dmazin 3y ago
I find the editorialization of my title hilarious. I did not put a ? at the end. The answer to any headline with a ? at the end is “no.” Whoever at HN edited it — this is not alright. Feel free to argue against the piece on its merits.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Dunno if dang will see your comment but if not, consider sending an email to HN. They have contact email in a link in the footer.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  they were just helping to boost your metrics by increasing engagement
- jacamera 3y ago
  I really don't understand the policy of altering headlines here. It's such petty, obnoxious behavior! I really wish they would stop doing it and I would be really annoyed if it happened to an article that I wrote and submitted myself. Thank you for calling it out.
  - dang 3y ago
    People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong. I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage. In other words, HN wouldn't exist.
    - jacamera 3y ago
      > People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong. I don't like or dislike any particular title or headline. I dislike the policy of selectively altering an author or publisher's chosen headline in general. > I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage. I appreciate the insight. Is the plan to keep this policy in place indefinitely in order to protect us from ourselves? I find it very depressing that a community like HN cannot be trusted to look at an unedited list of headlines. Do you think there is any hope of eventually developing something like a collective immunity (or even resistance) to clickbait? If it can't happen here, what does that say about the prospects for media literacy more broadly?
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Data is the only moat in the AI age. The problem for businesses is that the output of models can be used to train other models, so even a massive data moat will eventually be eroded. Eventually all B2C AI companies will be just slick interfaces over open models that are too large to run on commodity hardware. B2B AI is in a bit better shape, both because compiling niche business data sets can be expensive, and there won't be giant public data sets produced from their output.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Current VRAM prices are like that, because of Nvidias greed. I assembled one of my previous gaming PCs 10 years ago and installing 32 GB of RAM wasn't a problem back then. But you can't even buy a consumer GPU with 32 GB of VRAM. Data center cards are considerably more expensive. There's no technical reason to not have 100+GB consumer GPUs today.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    Historically consumer cards have been driven by the needs of gamers, and data center cards have mostly been slightly retooled consumer cards. Since game graphic needs have plateaued to some degree and I expect as AI gets incorporated into more things we'll see consumer cards that have lower game performance but a lot of memory and good basic model performance.
shp0ngle 3y ago
Why does everyone says “moat” these days? I haven’t heard this term so over-used even 2 months ago
- vultour 3y ago
  I have literally never heard this word before the infamous Google post, since then it's everywhere.
  - shp0ngle 3y ago
    What google post? I think I missed that one
    - vultour 3y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
js4 3y ago
The assumption here is that you need to continue to access Reddit to train models. The RefinedWeb / Falcon model has proven this is not true.
dirtyid 3y ago
Somewhat related, are there methods to embedd LLM "traps" like trap streets in maps to establish Provenance?
seydor 3y ago
So, when is MS purchasing Reddit?
renegat0x0 3y ago
It is funny for me that you have to include statements like "I do not suggest conspiracy", or "I am not conspiracy theorists", just as if suspecting that corporations or governments are up to no good is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. It is common sense. The disinformation battle has been won on "their" end. Suspecting a "Conspiracy" is considered a bad thing.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
Usually water sources get poisoned, they don't start out toxic.
karaterobot 3y ago
I love this theory from a conspiracy angle. But one issue is that they didn't cut off API access, they just made it more expensive. This creates a moat that small app developers can't cross, but not much of one for a funded AI company. If you that believed reddit's corpus was the key to training your own model, you'd just pay the money. It cuts off the wrong kind of person it would be targeted against if his theory is right.
PaulHoule 3y ago
OpenAI has nothing to do with it I think I think it is about forcing people to watch ads, particularly keeping reddit safe for "dark patterns". It's an awful experience to follow a link from a search engine for reddit because reddit systematically injects ads into results and discussion to try to trick you into clicking them and injects even more blended links to irrelevant discussions to increase your chances of getting confused and clicking on an ad accidentally. Third party clients destroy all that. People who want to harvest text from reddit can just do it on the web. (Pro tip: ignore the API and implement your own 'IPA' that just works like a web browser; APIs are almost always nerfed in some way; if you have to crawl 20 web sites odds are a generic web crawler will work for 19 of them; if you are using APIs you will have to implement something different for all of them, maybe 3 out of 20 will have some feature in the API such as a complex and poorly documented authentication process that will take a few hours.) APIs are not a gift, they usually are an attempt to take access away. (Considering Hacker News, there is no API to make a post or get your upvotes. It's like 20 lines of Python to code up an "IPA" for either against the web interface.)
theknocker 3y ago
It would embarrassingly hilarious for openai if this were true.
bsaul 3y ago
Reading this makes me thanks the gods wikipedia is what it is (aka : a nonprofit, dedicated to fullfilling its original benevolent mission). Imagine if google or microsoft had succeeded in overthrowing wikipedia, what internet would look like. Wikipedia, in itself, accounts for a good 50% of the positive image i have of the internet.
jimnotgym 3y ago
> Organizations/people with an interest in OpenAI – like Sam Altman and a16z – have a significant stake in Reddit, and strong ties to the board. This triggered me to review a thought I had. VC's are very keen with attending board meetings without being directors, retaining the right to appoint a director without carrying that out, and exerting control thought other means. I think some tightening of the concept of shadow directors is in order. Shadow directors are supposed to have the same legal responsibilities as properly appointed directors, yet they currently carry all the power without the reponsibilty
jimmytucson 3y ago
Problem is, Reddit can’t obscure its content from Google because it is a source of traffic and new users for them.
- dmazin 3y ago
  Woah, this is a really good point. That brings up an interesting question: can Reddit stipulate in its TOS that a search engine can crawl the site for the sake of engine indexing, but not train its models on it? I don't see why they can't add such language.
Imnimo 3y ago
If you accept that Reddit could be OpenAI's moat, I think you could explain Reddit's behavior even without OpenAI's intervention. Like the premise here is that Reddit's data is super valuable and so OpenAI would want to stop others from getting it. But it also makes sense to say Reddit's data is super valuable so Reddit would want to limit access to it and be able to charge a premium for it. That said, I'm not totally sold on the idea that Reddit has truly unique and valuable data that's a cut above what can be found elsewhere. After all, several of the so-called "glitch tokens" in GPT's tokenizer are Reddit user names that occur over and over in threads of people just counting. See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solidgoldmagikarp-iii-glitch-token-archaeology https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solidgoldm...
- dmazin 3y ago
  > If you accept that Reddit could be OpenAI's moat, I think you could explain Reddit's behavior even without OpenAI's intervention. Like the premise here is that Reddit's data is super valuable and so OpenAI would want to stop others from getting it. But it also makes sense to say Reddit's data is super valuable so Reddit would want to limit access to it and be able to charge a premium for it. I don't think I have a refutal, honestly. OpenAI aside, Reddit clearly has realized that their data is valuable, perhaps more valuable than their ads business. This is why my piece is frankly very speculative: the strategy aligns really well and the financial interests are there, but I wish I had a great argument why my theory is more likely than simply Reddit trying to capture the value of their data.
ronnykylin 3y ago
Maybe a little off-topic here, but if they use Twitter and Reddit as datasets to train their LLMs, how can they guarantee that the AI models will be unbiased. Prejudice, hatred, and ill intentions can all be very delicate to identify.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  > "how can they guarantee that the AI models will be unbiased" I don't think anyone is making any credible guarantee that any AI model is unbiased.
lamontcg 3y ago
> Now, hear me out. This turn of phrase almost always is followed by an argument you don't have to bother reading because it is wrong.
- dan-g 3y ago
  Did you have any actual points from the article you wanted to discuss, or call out as wrong? Or are you just communicating that you refused to read it because of the first line?
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    The rest of the points were adequately covered by everyone else.
    - dan-g 3y ago
      Which is my point, this didn’t add anything substantive to the discussion. From the commenting guidelines: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
itissid 3y ago
I had a thought(maybe naive). There is this idea(not new or mine) that, API based access aside, LLMs are increasingly able to embed (semi)structured details(like code or Dom based UI navigation) needed for planning(in the ai sense). Then what even is a moat? And then one fine day; some random guy has a local/private LLM trained to browse his facebook groups as him, his account gets deactivated meta; he sues arguing in court about right of using his own tool to mine personal data.
lonelycompiler 3y ago
Why was a ? Added to the end of the title?
- dang 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328268
voytec 3y ago
> This blew up on Hacker News. An HN mod edited the title to add a ? at the end. It was not me. The answer to any headline with a ? at the end is “no.” I would not own myself like that. Agree with the viewpoint. Hacker News is heavily moderated in a non-user-friendly way which results in some comments being nonsensical after moderation editorials and also disturbs searching for content by a title one remembers.
winddude 3y ago
>If Reddit merely wanted to restrict the ability to scrape its data, they could have done so without killing off clients – e.g. via licensing deals[1]. They haven't taken any steps to stop scrapping. They made access to the data via api extremely expensive. Calling an API is not crawling/scrapping. You can still crawl/scrape, well once/if the mod protest is over. And also stop calling it scrapping, it web crawling. I also actually wonder about the validity of it as training data. I've done a few experiments with fine tuning models, with a few hundred thousand samples curated from hundreds of millions of threads <https://huggingface.co/winddude/pb_lora_7b_v0.1 https://huggingface.co/winddude/pb_lora_7b_v0.1>. they are interesting, because they end up being so sarcastic. People tend to either be short, or overly opinionated. At the very least someone would have to do a lot of pre-processing, which would make it a transfomative work anyways.
gniv 3y ago
Wait. If ChatGPT ingested all of Reddit, shouldn't it be funnier?
ineedasername 3y ago
I think the author is on to something here, but isn't there a bridge across the moat re: scraping? Sure the API made things convenient, and scraping content will be a bit of an arms race, but scraping public postings that don't require a login to view still seems like a bridge over the moat. It's tempting to refer to the recent victory of LinkedIn over HiQ, but there's an important distinction in that ruling: It pertained to use of logged in accounts and did not explicitly overturn the prior ruling that public-facing data was fair game. For now it's all still unknown territory. I would be skeptical of anyone who adamantly affirms a position that scraping for training is allowed/not-allowed because it is not yet settled law in the US where these companies are headquartered or the rest of the world where they operate.
angryasian 3y ago
Reddit shut down their api for one reason IPO has to show growth and the only growth left for reddit is *FORCING* users to their own app. They shut down i.reddit and reddit.compact so theres no optimized mobile web format. Now they shut down api access to apps. Its as clear as day. I don't think they give a sh*t about AI
ttepasse 3y ago
I’m always irritated by the theory of the motivation of closing API access being LLMs. To forbid LLMs simply could be a legal paragraph in Reddit’s API terms of service. Good actors would abide, bad actors would still crawl and scrape the HTML. Practically the same situation with the closed API from July forward, but without the drama. Killing 3rd-party clients seems the far more likely motivation.
Havoc 3y ago
Conde Nast is majority shareholder, not OpenAI, and they're not going to be onboard with wrecking reddit in an attempt to build a moat for another company. It's just silly. Besides, if someone really wanted to get to the data they could just scrape it. Google, Bing & co index it after all. Bit of a pain in the ass but not impossible

286 points by dmazin 3y ago

This article misses the mark for me. It wields reddit as meaningful source of openAI's performance, and then goes down a rabbit hole from there. OpenAI's moat is the thousands of 'human in the loop' contractors that they hired in south america... for years... Not reddit...

csdvrx 3y ago

It would make a lot of sense for Microsoft to buy reddit: a curated source of data is the perfect moat! They could come as a white knight, restoring the API access but for apps only, conveniently blocking competitors while satisfying the users.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
Heh... and take responsibility for all the porn and various "degeneracy" on there? It makes them a perfect political punching bag.
- csdvrx 3y ago
  They could claim remaining true to the original spirit or whatever excuse will fly. How many billions will AI be worth in the future? What's the cost of the potential reputation damage for having a edgy brand? All that matters is the operation can be expected to be profitable. Better: what would be the synergies between the xbox audience and the reddit audience? The "degenerates" are clients like any others, maybe also with more disposable income.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  "We recognize the value online communities provide in training the state of the art in generative AI. With that in mind, we have acquired Reddit and intend to operate it as a wholly owned subsidiary. After an exhaustive search, we've selected $adult_ceo_with_social_experience to lead the team as they work to ensure Reddit can continue to operate as both a safe and vibrant digital oasis, where people can come together to share their interests and passions." One might argue these communities are too valuable to generative AI to allow them to flail under current substandard management.
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    "Let's now show the new Bing, where high quality data from reddit is better ranked and the selected by default for {whatever_category_you_think_matters} thanks to automatic classification of the search questions by GPT" There are many synergies that aren't properly considered by a naive take. I use site:reddit.com with most of my queries. I now prefer bing to google. Bing market share is growing. Coughing up a few B to avoid reddit going on with an IPO would be a very strategic move on many fronts.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Github acquisition was a savvy, Reddit has more peril involved but similar value.
      - csdvrx 3y ago
        I'm in full agreement, but I see an even better integration in other product lines (mostly gaming and search) Also, Microsoft doesn't have a generic social network to mine data from. They may prefer to stick to the professional world, but then acquiring a few high value sites just to close their API would be another move. How much $$$ do you think it would take for YC to say "hell yes!" to put HN under Microsoft control? How valuable would it be to add a few conditions like a very generous giveaway of azure credits to HN companies in return of exclusivity (no more S3 or google cloud for the new batch!)
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        > They may prefer to stick to the professional world, but then acquiring a few high value sites just to close their API would be another move. They already have LinkedIn, which is far more valuable than HN for this purpose.
        csdvrx 3y ago
        Yes, Linkedin is a professional social network, but no, you will not find high quality content there. There's a lot of value for keeping in touch with the zeitgeist (ex: sqlite innovations, llama etc) and finding new trends on HN There's about 0 value from using linkedin.
- GaggiX 3y ago
  The model will be aligned anyway, the internet is full of porn and degeneracy, not just Reddit.
whimsicalism 3y ago
They have no desire for the political risk of running a non-professional social media as a major government contractor.
kyleyeats 3y ago
This is so smart that I'm now convinced it's what's happening.

behnamoh 3y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if ClosedAI closed yet another part of their product, in this case, the training data itself.

blovescoffee 3y ago

Except Google and Microsoft/Bing search engines have already cached lots of that data just to provide their service. Facebook has its own treasure trove. Apple less so but they're also the least competitive in the AI space (of the FAANG) atm.

dmbche 3y ago
I'm no expert on corporate law, but maybe them aquiring reddit data makes that data illegal to use for others to train their models on? Even if available, if it's not legal to use the big guys can't touch it.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  OpenAI's trying to argue that line, but given that most of OpenAI's models are trained on scraped data that they had no legal right to other than existing court precedents on scraped public data, they don't have much of a leg to stand on.
- hiatus 3y ago
  If AI can be trained on copyrighted works without issue I don't see how an argument could be made against using reddit data for training.

corry 3y ago

Could OpenAI acquire Reddit as an alternative to their IPO? Let's say it's worth $10B - quite a sum especially if OpenAI is 'only' worth $40B - $50B. But a world in which compute isn't a moat, LLMs aren't a moat... but real human-generated content IS a moat... maybe it could make sense?

whimsicalism 3y ago
$10b is probably too low
gwd 3y ago
I mean, that would be kind of insane, but it could actually work: OpenAI needs "clean", high-quality data as input for its AI; rather than harvesting data to sell to advertisers, they could and finance major internet infrastructure -- the equivalents of StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook -- to harvest data to feed their models. That might actually make the world a better place.
sebzim4500 3y ago
Why would you pay $10B for data which you can scrape for $50 from a few seedboxes? Or if that's too much work for you, just download one of them many archives that are already freely available online.

jtode 3y ago

[flagged]

NamTaf 3y ago
a16z is Andreessen Horowitz, which is trivially discoverable via your search engine of choice since it's also their website, https://a16z.com/ https://a16z.com/ They're a major VC firm
mabbo 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flapjaxy 3y ago
It's Andreessen Horowitz's VC firm https://a16z.com/ https://a16z.com/
littlestymaar 3y ago
Andreessen Horowitz is probably the most famous VC firm in Silicon Valley…
- jtode 3y ago
  Well, my downvotes are well deserved, asking such a question here.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    If you were just asking a question you probably wouldn't have been downvoted though…
    - jtode 3y ago
      You're right, I was railing against in-slang, if we're interrogating my actual statement. I understand why people use it on platforms like twitter; everywhere else it's like saying "ell oh ell" to me after I tell a joke.

JimtheCoder 3y ago

I may be in the minority here, but if I want the opinion of Redditors on an issue, I will use a search engine to look for it specifically, thus knowing the provenance of the information I am receiving. I don't really want the corpus of Reddit data influencing the output of a generative AI model...because it's Reddit, after all... Even though I am pretty sure it is already included in the training dataset already... I could be wrong, though...

coffeebeqn 3y ago
Reddits community is passive aggressive, thinks it’s really smart, loves memes. I certainly hope OpenAI doesn’t view it at as some kind of a source of truth
- rchaud 3y ago
  You just described the C-suite at most SV companies.
- pixl97 3y ago
  No, they view it as a language model. You can tell lies with the same language that you can tell truth with. If you want truth, you don't want language, you want references to reviewed work. You also want things like 'show your work' chains of though. These are really different things. If I tell GPT "make up a story" I don't want it coming back and saying, sorry I can only tell the truth.
moron4hire 3y ago
Seriously hope OpenAI is stripping all the canned meme replies that go on for hundreds of sub threads and end up as the top comments in threads before they train their models. How would you even do that reliably?
- jononor 3y ago
  Label data and build a meme classifier? Does not have to be perfect to be useful. But yeah, data curation is probably a huge endeavor at the companies making Language model that are fit for production. Like in practically all applications of Machine Learning. But the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is also one of the key tools to getting useful outputs.

meowface 3y ago

I'm sure I'm missing something, but: aren't there publicly available corpuses of all reddit posts up to a certain date? Why wouldn't researchers train with these? Are they just not recent enough? Even if they aren't very recent, how big of a deal is that when it comes to training models that presumably use lots of other data sources as well?

dathinab 3y ago
> up to a certain date? > just not recent enough thats a very big deal for a lot of the content you find on reddit which users might want to get answers from from an AI.
sebzim4500 3y ago
There are massive up to date archives available https://tracker.archiveteam.org/reddit/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/reddit/ I guess either OP doesn't know about them or he assumes that AI researchers won't think of using them.
mattstir 3y ago
Basically the only thing that comes to mind is that our collective views and knowledge about topics can change over time. If we had a hypothetical LLM in the 1930's, it would have had quite different views on things like mental health, civil rights, and so on. But like you said, the models would ideally be trained on many other data sources as well.
LittleShaman 3y ago
The author is aware of that, mentions it towards the end: > Most of Reddit’s current data has been scraped anyway, so the game is to protect Reddit’s data going forward. But yes, Pushshift archives of all posts and comments until the recent ban [1] are freely available for download [2] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/135tdl2/a_response_from_pushshift_a_call_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/135tdl2/a_respon... The ban was followed by allowing the parent non-profit of Pushshift (Network Contagion Research Institute) to use the API provided access is restricted to a use-case Reddit has care for: mod tools. Reddit hasnt replaced those with its own just yet. The rest of us are shut out. [2] https://academictorrents.com/userdetails.php?id=9863 https://academictorrents.com/userdetails.php?id=9863

victor22 3y ago

100% Open AI is already making fake AI-generated posts and comments in reddit for a while. Pack it up boys, internet ran by humans is over.

flandre 3y ago
Should've packed it up back in usenet days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney Also, if reddit is in any dataset of these models then it's no wonder that I'm not intrigued by artificial """intelligence""" at all.
- denverllc 3y ago
  Looking at the examples discussing Reagan on the Wiki page, is this generated text looking to sway public opinion? This could be used to sway elections! What sort of precautions did the hacker named Mark V Shaney take before releasing this into the wild? These so called “Mark Off Chains” are too dangerous to be let into the wild. They should only be made available to the largest corporations who can protect us from their dangers. I’m going to write my senator to make sure this isn’t made publicly available!

bzmrgonz 3y ago

I agree wholeheartedly with this ... and given Microsoft's trail of corporate bodies in its wake.. I wouldn't put it passed them to be orchestrating the cutting of all data-lakes for AI training, especially a clean and pre-processed source like Reddit. if data is water that corporations drink(which it is).. REDDIT is like finding a naturally occurring spring of Perrier water(by natural, I mean, we are the ants who bring this water one drop at a time from the soft petals of plants which collect the night dew).

Weryj 3y ago
I would like to be compensated for the digital oil I've produced.
- c22 3y ago
  You can be compensated the same way we compensate the earth for real oil: by burning your output to create a toxic environment for you to exist in.
whimsicalism 3y ago
This is much more YC/VC maneuvering than it is Microsoft.

rileywatkins 3y ago

It’s a fun thought experiment, but I tend to revert to the simpler explanation: They’re cutting off third party apps to increase their control over the user experience, to show more ads. The relationship with OpenAI might also be a thing, but I think it’s the ad numbers they need to juice for their IPO.

dmazin 3y ago
I think that explanation certainly the simpler one (and thus more believable), but one thing that stands out to me is that Reddit's ads are really bad. I don't know how much of a business it is. I think the value as a corpus is much greater. If I owned both Reddit and OpenAI, I'd prioritize OpenAI since its upside is bigger. Of course, I think another good explanation is that, OpenAI aside, Reddit simply wants to get paid for their data, which they now realize is valuable. Scraping aside, that might be the real goal here.

williamcotton 3y ago

When Reddit goes public and certain executives give preferential treatment to another corporation due to closed door deals they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit from their shareholders.

skilled 3y ago

This might as well be as good place as any to say that I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years time we find out that the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft was also done in OpenAI's favor. I know it's probably a crazy theory, but it did cross my mind a few months ago.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Doesn't make any sense timeline wise, business execs at Microsoft were probably not thinking seriously about openai at the time
kirubakaran 3y ago
The really impressive feat here is not even that, but MS inventing time travel to acquire Github before OpenAI was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eyes
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  OpenAI certainly existed in 2018 but I don't think I noticed most people being aware of them outside of the industry.
  - kirubakaran 3y ago
    You’re right, my bad, I misremembered the Github acquisition year

fullshark 3y ago

If they then run the site at a loss and optimize it for ingesting well structured training data to their models it might become decent again. Basically what Stack Overflow was trying to become but its users rebelled.

deafpolygon 3y ago

The data Reddit has on its NSFW content (you know which one.. yes, the pornographic one) must be worth millions. No, no... jeez, you pervs... not the content. The upvote/downvote data for every image will probably train any generative AI on exactly what makes a good porn video/pic - and we all know sex sells. The dirty comments, and etc. On top of that, they'd make really useful leverage if you can connect any one of these accounts to their real world counterparts. I bet an AI with a large enough dataset could make short work of that.

dontupvoteme 3y ago
>The data Reddit has on its NSFW content (you know which one.. yes, the pornographic one) must be worth millions. Blackmailing people who participated in /r/jailbait? I would bump that up a 0 or two. Sorry, just thinking about how an AI would go about acquiring resources. Please tell me that admin guy wasn't part of that.

cfcf14 3y ago

Some strange claims in this post. The reddit post datasets are already 'out there' in the wild, and I'm fairly certain every other major LLM release has used their data. Also - did Midjourney "steal" DALLE-2's lunch? It's a restrictive service with essentially a discord-only based CLI.

eggbrain 3y ago

I think from Reddit's perspective, they are extremely upset with OpenAI, in the same way that I'm sure StackOverflow is upset -- OpenAI took: - The entire corpus of data the community had curated over the last XX years - The "goodwill" that these platforms had developed towards third party developers in allowing developers to work with their data - Potentially large amounts of traffic that would normally come to their sites via Google (e.g. site:reddit.com), that is now available instantly (and customized) via ChatGPT Despite Reddit's probably closer connections to OpenAI than other startups through Y-Combinator and Sam Altman, I wonder how keen they are to actually work with a company that potentially destroyed a ton of their value, right before they were ready to IPO.

skilled 3y ago
I agree with you but not in entirety. This comment from spez[0] about blaming the API price changes on LLM's is too far fetched. A lot of commenters here on HN have already pointed that out already too. Unless they build a literal brick wall (paywall) around the site, that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. You could get it down to a science where you only scrape any new data whenever you train the next model. [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnk9izp/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
- ltadeut 3y ago
  > , that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model. How would that work from a legal perspective, though? Let's say there's no paywall and Reddit's terms of use disallow unauthorized commercial use of their data. Wouldn't that be a violation of Reddit's terms and liable to some legal procedure?
  - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
    It is OpenAI's and Microsoft's position that obtaining, using for training, and displaying data via AI is fair use.

rytheturtle 3y ago

people won’t care about Reddit’s internal governance policy when researching mattress toppers, but they will care about finding relevant, recent information. The gamble Reddit is taking is “do we think we can provide a competitive user experience and ecosystem without 3rd party developers?”. If the answer is yes, people will keep using and contributing to Reddit and it will remain a valuable source of information regardless of the lack of 3rd party apps. It could pay off, but if the Googles and Metas of the world just start offering AI training data as a product, it wouldn’t really benefit OpenAI if Reddit in particular locked down some older data at the expense of it’s user base. Time will tell if the move will work out for Reddit in the long term.

arijun 3y ago

I’m not sure exactly what the moat would be here—the current data is already probably available, and future data OpenAI will have to pay for just like everyone else. Ok, looking closer at the article I see > The important piece is that it’s easiest for OpenAI to get the data (given that companies with co-investors help each other) which seems like a pretty weak basis to form a moat (if Reddit IPOs as is their plan, sama’s influence will be not nearly as strong)

raincole 3y ago

(I know it's a satire) It's quite naive if someone think all the major tech big boys who have at least moderate ambitions about AI haven't already at least archived Wikipedia, Reddit and StackOverflow.

thrdbndndn 3y ago

> They could extend the June 30th deadline, which I think is likely. This would get rid of 3rd party apps while, perhaps, keeping most of the community intact. I don't get what the author is trying to say here. If the deadline was extended, why would it "get rid of 3rd party apps"? I assume because some (Apollo, RIF) said they're going to close anyway even if the deadline was extended? If so, the community will not be "intact". If the author think the death of 3rd party won't affect the community, then Reddit don't need to extend the deadline.

nightpool 3y ago

This post is wrong on several aspects the other commenters have already pointed out, but it raises this tangential point which I'm curious about "They could buy out more 3rd party clients, which would somewhat appease the community. This would be a terrible move IPO-wise." Why would this be a terrible move IPO wise? If Reddit has two major apps, one for casual users and one for power-users, and it has enough control to eventually put (tasteful) ads in both, how is that bad for their IPO? I don't think it's likely, given how much goodwill they've already burned with the community, but from a pure IPO perspective it seems like a solid go forward strategy

nostrademons 3y ago

The leaked Google memo "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" is instructive here: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne... Original author is an ML researcher, and the crux of his argument is that most weights in a LLM are significantly overdetermined. Once you have ingested several terabytes of natural language, you know how to generate natural language. The remaining misses are facts that it has never seen, usually because they are so obvious that nobody thinks to write them down explicitly. And so more training data doesn't necessarily help LLM performance, unless you're either ingesting either extremely basic facts that are so obvious most adult discourse overlooks them, or you're ingesting expert knowledge that's highly specific and only discussed in a few forums. Reddit data could perhaps help with the latter, but a.) Reddit is usually not the place to go for expert discourse and b.) there are other better sources of data for it. You'd usually be better off training on trade publications, scientific journals, or fandom than Reddit. Also the LLaMa/RedPajama approach makes this stupidly easy, because you can pass around patch sets to the model trained on specific mini-corpora, and then update the weights appropriately. Hence why the author of the Google memo believes neither Google nor OpenAI has a viable moat.

bbor 3y ago
This is a great analysis that really cleared up the impact of that memo for that me. You clearly know but for any readers who aren’t clear: that memo is the opinion of one engineer at google, and far from the (apparent) opinion of the relevant execs
- refulgentis 3y ago
  It’s dead wrong, I suggest reading the original. _No one_ thinks models trained on more data would be about the same, since everything flows out of that premise…then throws Current Thing on top…it’s very unhelpful. The “patches” he refers to are LoRA and are treated as deus ex machina. They’re not, ex. playing with Stable Diffusion we can see they’re additive but they’re not nearly as good as training the original model on the data. (Disclaimer: Googler)

civilitty 3y ago

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills: Reddit is on CommonCrawl, which means its all available without API access, permanently from AWS’s CDN. These discussions are completely moot because the path of least resistance was already available and in use by OpenAI

coffeebeqn 3y ago
Thank you, I had no idea about that site
mritchie712 3y ago
Good call, but is upvote / downvote data in there? I'd imagine OpenAI is doing something with that.
dmazin 3y ago
I need to stress this more obviously in the article, but the goal is to protect Reddit's future data.
- civilitty 3y ago
  Why would Reddit block CommonCrawl's access to future data?
screye 3y ago
Yeah, all the publicly available reddit data is freely available and the cat has been out of the bag for a while. Reddit has a lot of other private information though. The entire corpus of moderated / censored comments is the internet's best alignment dataset. The real upvote/downvote numbers make for perfect RLHF. Hell, Reddit could remove ads and replace them with paid RLHFing bots. Charge OpenAI money to selectively deploy AI bots to certain QA subreddits. All AI generated comments get deleted within a week. That way it doesn't lead to comment spam, but the bot still gets amazing upvote/downvote feedback and a ton of direct comment-reply feedback. 3rd party apps can't 'ad block' it either, since only Reddit knows which comments are fake. (psst, reddit, if you're gonna steal my idea, I want to be paid for it)

duxup 3y ago

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches? Is it? When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations. Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic. For example the networking topics often were “small shop” focused and users unaware of very common enterprise level practices, and when they saw someone mention it they would react really poorly. The result was advice tailored to small shops that have limited staff, so you got ideas that “work” but would perform poorly at scale (at best) and at times could present security risks, miss opportunities where more performance was needed, better solutions were available with a sizable staff and planning. They weren’t wrong, but the answers were skewed. Subreddits are weird, they might be about a topic but the community often moves that topic/ has a specific pov within that topic… people without those views tend to abandon those subs and those who remain aren’t necessarily “right”. Reddit isn’t stack overflow where being correct is at least on the surface valued where we can run code and see if it works. Top answer on Reddit could be wrong and anyone taking issue with it may simply not answer. Heck there are whole subreddits dedicated to wallowing in misinformation… Now I don’t know if Q&A is the start and end of LLM training (not my area of expertise at all, I am open to the possibility that what I’m talking about isn’t a problem at all) but Reddit as a source makes me wonder what the results would be.

rjh29 3y ago
Yes. For anything from opinions of movies/games to DIY advice to nerdy stuff like the best watch to buy in a given price range or the best synthesiser. Or people's opinions on a particular episode of TV! Or basically any hobby. It's not great for business stuff because there are way more people using e.g. AWS for their hobby project than running multi-million $ businesses on it. What are the alternatives? Facebook and Discord are walled gardens. Quora is a shithole. The rest of the internet is blogspam and significantly more dubious than your average Reddit comment!
- flandre 3y ago
  My favorite alternatives are email and going outside.

fnovd 3y ago

Maybe if reddit developed some expertise in using all of the user data they have to tag, categorize, annotate every comment, they would have something of value to provide. Their recent actions only angered users and won't stop future LLMs from using their data for the reasons many others here have noted.

kajaktum 3y ago

They can still scrap the website? The fact is that many, many internet businesses today not make sense. Many of them are bleeding money with no possible path to profitability ahead. Mostly due to the fact that people's expectations are very different and I would argue even skewed. Clearly hosting Reddit is expensive, but who really pays for it? People don't like ads, don't like to pay for services, don't like to be reminded that they can provide donations (Wikipedia). What else is there? Hoping the customers have the suddenly conscience to fund the product? I foresee many internet companies dying over the next few years with no real replacement to crop up. But people always forget and history repeats itself; so maybe we will just see an endless reincarnations of similarly failed products.

joot82 3y ago
They know hardly anyone would pay for a social link aggregator and discussion board, but some people might donate a coffee to a beloved app developer on their phone. Hence the only way forward in their mind to charge for API calls. Even if it kills many of those apps, some will suck it up and charge their users. That it makes life harder for LLM competition and benefits their guy Sam is just a nice side effect. But I'm pretty confident that there will be daily reddit dumps available for training very soon as Torrent for anyone that can't afford to hide their scraping, if they not already are.
- telotortium 3y ago
  Then Reddit the company should charge Apollo a reasonable price, not an extortionate price that will kill the apps altogether. And lay off the majority of the staff, just like Twitter. Sure, the experience may get slightly worse, but it will be fine. The real issue is just trying to take Reddit to IPO.
sebzim4500 3y ago
Is hosting reddit hard? Or do they just have thousands of employees who have little reason to exist.

drumhead 3y ago

If Reddit is such a valuable property it would make sense for one of the big AI players to come in and buy it out before it IPOs and the value shoots through the roof. Open Ai is the most likely one given the links between Altman and the management. But a new entry like maybe Apple could swoop in. We know how useless the management of Reddit are at making money from it, a sale in it's entirety might be the best exit for the VCs and for them.

sebzim4500 3y ago
>before it IPOs and the value shoots through the roof Maybe they want to wait for it to IPO and then drop 90% instead.
rchaud 3y ago
Reddit is valuable for its milk, but gave away the cow years ago with the free API.

ChumpGPT 3y ago

Couldn't OpenAI create it's own "Reddit" to farm and harvest? Seems like it would be easy with the resources they have and don't even attempt to reinvent it, just copy it.

dmazin 3y ago

I find the editorialization of my title hilarious. I did not put a ? at the end. The answer to any headline with a ? at the end is “no.” Whoever at HN edited it — this is not alright. Feel free to argue against the piece on its merits.

codetrotter 3y ago
Dunno if dang will see your comment but if not, consider sending an email to HN. They have contact email in a link in the footer.
ftxbro 3y ago
they were just helping to boost your metrics by increasing engagement
jacamera 3y ago
I really don't understand the policy of altering headlines here. It's such petty, obnoxious behavior! I really wish they would stop doing it and I would be really annoyed if it happened to an article that I wrote and submitted myself. Thank you for calling it out.
- dang 3y ago
  People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong. I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage. In other words, HN wouldn't exist.
  - jacamera 3y ago
    > People get upset about title editing on HN because they only notice the cases they dislike. Any practice will seem obnoxious if you only count the things it gets wrong. I don't like or dislike any particular title or headline. I dislike the policy of selectively altering an author or publisher's chosen headline in general. > I can tell you after over a decade doing this job that the title moderation on HN is probably the single most beneficial thing we do. Without that, the front page would consist of linkbait, sensationalism, and rage. I appreciate the insight. Is the plan to keep this policy in place indefinitely in order to protect us from ourselves? I find it very depressing that a community like HN cannot be trusted to look at an unedited list of headlines. Do you think there is any hope of eventually developing something like a collective immunity (or even resistance) to clickbait? If it can't happen here, what does that say about the prospects for media literacy more broadly?

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Data is the only moat in the AI age. The problem for businesses is that the output of models can be used to train other models, so even a massive data moat will eventually be eroded. Eventually all B2C AI companies will be just slick interfaces over open models that are too large to run on commodity hardware. B2B AI is in a bit better shape, both because compiling niche business data sets can be expensive, and there won't be giant public data sets produced from their output.

zirgs 3y ago
Current VRAM prices are like that, because of Nvidias greed. I assembled one of my previous gaming PCs 10 years ago and installing 32 GB of RAM wasn't a problem back then. But you can't even buy a consumer GPU with 32 GB of VRAM. Data center cards are considerably more expensive. There's no technical reason to not have 100+GB consumer GPUs today.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Historically consumer cards have been driven by the needs of gamers, and data center cards have mostly been slightly retooled consumer cards. Since game graphic needs have plateaued to some degree and I expect as AI gets incorporated into more things we'll see consumer cards that have lower game performance but a lot of memory and good basic model performance.

shp0ngle 3y ago

Why does everyone says “moat” these days? I haven’t heard this term so over-used even 2 months ago

vultour 3y ago
I have literally never heard this word before the infamous Google post, since then it's everywhere.
- shp0ngle 3y ago
  What google post? I think I missed that one
  - vultour 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

js4 3y ago

The assumption here is that you need to continue to access Reddit to train models. The RefinedWeb / Falcon model has proven this is not true.

dirtyid 3y ago

Somewhat related, are there methods to embedd LLM "traps" like trap streets in maps to establish Provenance?

seydor 3y ago

So, when is MS purchasing Reddit?

renegat0x0 3y ago

It is funny for me that you have to include statements like "I do not suggest conspiracy", or "I am not conspiracy theorists", just as if suspecting that corporations or governments are up to no good is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. It is common sense. The disinformation battle has been won on "their" end. Suspecting a "Conspiracy" is considered a bad thing.

dontupvoteme 3y ago

Usually water sources get poisoned, they don't start out toxic.

karaterobot 3y ago

I love this theory from a conspiracy angle. But one issue is that they didn't cut off API access, they just made it more expensive. This creates a moat that small app developers can't cross, but not much of one for a funded AI company. If you that believed reddit's corpus was the key to training your own model, you'd just pay the money. It cuts off the wrong kind of person it would be targeted against if his theory is right.

PaulHoule 3y ago

OpenAI has nothing to do with it I think I think it is about forcing people to watch ads, particularly keeping reddit safe for "dark patterns". It's an awful experience to follow a link from a search engine for reddit because reddit systematically injects ads into results and discussion to try to trick you into clicking them and injects even more blended links to irrelevant discussions to increase your chances of getting confused and clicking on an ad accidentally. Third party clients destroy all that. People who want to harvest text from reddit can just do it on the web. (Pro tip: ignore the API and implement your own 'IPA' that just works like a web browser; APIs are almost always nerfed in some way; if you have to crawl 20 web sites odds are a generic web crawler will work for 19 of them; if you are using APIs you will have to implement something different for all of them, maybe 3 out of 20 will have some feature in the API such as a complex and poorly documented authentication process that will take a few hours.) APIs are not a gift, they usually are an attempt to take access away. (Considering Hacker News, there is no API to make a post or get your upvotes. It's like 20 lines of Python to code up an "IPA" for either against the web interface.)

theknocker 3y ago

It would embarrassingly hilarious for openai if this were true.

bsaul 3y ago

Reading this makes me thanks the gods wikipedia is what it is (aka : a nonprofit, dedicated to fullfilling its original benevolent mission). Imagine if google or microsoft had succeeded in overthrowing wikipedia, what internet would look like. Wikipedia, in itself, accounts for a good 50% of the positive image i have of the internet.

jimnotgym 3y ago

> Organizations/people with an interest in OpenAI – like Sam Altman and a16z – have a significant stake in Reddit, and strong ties to the board. This triggered me to review a thought I had. VC's are very keen with attending board meetings without being directors, retaining the right to appoint a director without carrying that out, and exerting control thought other means. I think some tightening of the concept of shadow directors is in order. Shadow directors are supposed to have the same legal responsibilities as properly appointed directors, yet they currently carry all the power without the reponsibilty

jimmytucson 3y ago

Problem is, Reddit can’t obscure its content from Google because it is a source of traffic and new users for them.

dmazin 3y ago
Woah, this is a really good point. That brings up an interesting question: can Reddit stipulate in its TOS that a search engine can crawl the site for the sake of engine indexing, but not train its models on it? I don't see why they can't add such language.

Imnimo 3y ago

If you accept that Reddit could be OpenAI's moat, I think you could explain Reddit's behavior even without OpenAI's intervention. Like the premise here is that Reddit's data is super valuable and so OpenAI would want to stop others from getting it. But it also makes sense to say Reddit's data is super valuable so Reddit would want to limit access to it and be able to charge a premium for it. That said, I'm not totally sold on the idea that Reddit has truly unique and valuable data that's a cut above what can be found elsewhere. After all, several of the so-called "glitch tokens" in GPT's tokenizer are Reddit user names that occur over and over in threads of people just counting. See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solidgoldmagikarp-iii-glitch-token-archaeology https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viQEp8KBg2QSW4Yc/solidgoldm...

dmazin 3y ago
> If you accept that Reddit could be OpenAI's moat, I think you could explain Reddit's behavior even without OpenAI's intervention. Like the premise here is that Reddit's data is super valuable and so OpenAI would want to stop others from getting it. But it also makes sense to say Reddit's data is super valuable so Reddit would want to limit access to it and be able to charge a premium for it. I don't think I have a refutal, honestly. OpenAI aside, Reddit clearly has realized that their data is valuable, perhaps more valuable than their ads business. This is why my piece is frankly very speculative: the strategy aligns really well and the financial interests are there, but I wish I had a great argument why my theory is more likely than simply Reddit trying to capture the value of their data.

ronnykylin 3y ago

Maybe a little off-topic here, but if they use Twitter and Reddit as datasets to train their LLMs, how can they guarantee that the AI models will be unbiased. Prejudice, hatred, and ill intentions can all be very delicate to identify.

ftxbro 3y ago
> "how can they guarantee that the AI models will be unbiased" I don't think anyone is making any credible guarantee that any AI model is unbiased.

lamontcg 3y ago

> Now, hear me out. This turn of phrase almost always is followed by an argument you don't have to bother reading because it is wrong.

dan-g 3y ago
Did you have any actual points from the article you wanted to discuss, or call out as wrong? Or are you just communicating that you refused to read it because of the first line?
- lamontcg 3y ago
  The rest of the points were adequately covered by everyone else.
  - dan-g 3y ago
    Which is my point, this didn’t add anything substantive to the discussion. From the commenting guidelines: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

itissid 3y ago

I had a thought(maybe naive). There is this idea(not new or mine) that, API based access aside, LLMs are increasingly able to embed (semi)structured details(like code or Dom based UI navigation) needed for planning(in the ai sense). Then what even is a moat? And then one fine day; some random guy has a local/private LLM trained to browse his facebook groups as him, his account gets deactivated meta; he sues arguing in court about right of using his own tool to mine personal data.

lonelycompiler 3y ago

Why was a ? Added to the end of the title?

dang 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328268

voytec 3y ago

> This blew up on Hacker News. An HN mod edited the title to add a ? at the end. It was not me. The answer to any headline with a ? at the end is “no.” I would not own myself like that. Agree with the viewpoint. Hacker News is heavily moderated in a non-user-friendly way which results in some comments being nonsensical after moderation editorials and also disturbs searching for content by a title one remembers.

winddude 3y ago

>If Reddit merely wanted to restrict the ability to scrape its data, they could have done so without killing off clients – e.g. via licensing deals[1]. They haven't taken any steps to stop scrapping. They made access to the data via api extremely expensive. Calling an API is not crawling/scrapping. You can still crawl/scrape, well once/if the mod protest is over. And also stop calling it scrapping, it web crawling. I also actually wonder about the validity of it as training data. I've done a few experiments with fine tuning models, with a few hundred thousand samples curated from hundreds of millions of threads <https://huggingface.co/winddude/pb_lora_7b_v0.1 https://huggingface.co/winddude/pb_lora_7b_v0.1>. they are interesting, because they end up being so sarcastic. People tend to either be short, or overly opinionated. At the very least someone would have to do a lot of pre-processing, which would make it a transfomative work anyways.

gniv 3y ago

Wait. If ChatGPT ingested all of Reddit, shouldn't it be funnier?

ineedasername 3y ago

I think the author is on to something here, but isn't there a bridge across the moat re: scraping? Sure the API made things convenient, and scraping content will be a bit of an arms race, but scraping public postings that don't require a login to view still seems like a bridge over the moat. It's tempting to refer to the recent victory of LinkedIn over HiQ, but there's an important distinction in that ruling: It pertained to use of logged in accounts and did not explicitly overturn the prior ruling that public-facing data was fair game. For now it's all still unknown territory. I would be skeptical of anyone who adamantly affirms a position that scraping for training is allowed/not-allowed because it is not yet settled law in the US where these companies are headquartered or the rest of the world where they operate.

angryasian 3y ago

Reddit shut down their api for one reason IPO has to show growth and the only growth left for reddit is *FORCING* users to their own app. They shut down i.reddit and reddit.compact so theres no optimized mobile web format. Now they shut down api access to apps. Its as clear as day. I don't think they give a sh*t about AI

ttepasse 3y ago

I’m always irritated by the theory of the motivation of closing API access being LLMs. To forbid LLMs simply could be a legal paragraph in Reddit’s API terms of service. Good actors would abide, bad actors would still crawl and scrape the HTML. Practically the same situation with the closed API from July forward, but without the drama. Killing 3rd-party clients seems the far more likely motivation.

Havoc 3y ago

Conde Nast is majority shareholder, not OpenAI, and they're not going to be onboard with wrecking reddit in an attempt to build a moat for another company. It's just silly. Besides, if someone really wanted to get to the data they could just scrape it. Google, Bing & co index it after all. Bit of a pain in the ass but not impossible