Would You Sell Your Social Data To AI Companies? (You’ll Soon Be Able To)

TL;DR

• Masa, a decentralized AI community, is launching a ‘contribute-data-to-earn’ mannequin — the place you obtain an app, share your social knowledge, and earn token rewards in return.

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So, you’re most likely conversant in the idea of decentralized compute energy…

You let people entry your laptop’s processing capabilities → you earn crypto in return.

The idea has gained quite a bit momentum ever because the AI growth began — trigger Giant Language Fashions (LLMs) like ChatGPT require a whooole bunch of compute energy to run.

(Sufficient to make crowd sourced compute energy make sense).

The opposite facet of the AI equation — the facet that’s talked about most, however not often paid for — is the info used to coach these fashions. Proper now, most LLMs are being skilled totally free on the web’s collective content material archive.

Masa, a decentralized AI compute community, is launching a ‘contribute-data-to-earn’ mannequin — the place you:

Which is very cool! But in addition brings two large inquiries to thoughts:

1. If AI firms can already get this knowledge totally free, why would they unexpectedly begin paying for them?

2. What knowledge are people incentivized to contribute (and what makes it so invaluable)?

Effectively, the Masa app isn’t dwell but — however we do have a press launch that sheds some gentle on the idea, and helps reply these questions.

First, what we’ve stitched collectively from the press launch:

There’s an enormous quantity of on-line knowledge that’s walled off, and people partitions are getting increased day by day…

Now that these LLMs (and the coaching knowledge that powers them) have gotten so darn invaluable, platforms like Fb, Instagram, X, and so on. are incentivized to dam AI firms from scraping their knowledge, and as an alternative use it to construct their very own LLMs (e.g. Fb’s Llama, and X’s Grok).

Masa finds a facet door into these walled gardens, by incentivizing customers to grant entry to their social accounts (X, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, and so on.), and — in the event that they select to — revenue by promoting this entry to 3rd events.

Second, a wild guess on the future:

The web is a large number of data, which contributes to AI ‘hallucinations’ (aka making stuff up), like this.

Sooner or later, somebody’s going to make a market for vetted knowledge on a spread of matters, in order that dependable use-case-specific AI fashions could be spun up.

This might be a primary run at such an idea.

Our takeaway:

Having the ability to revenue from our private knowledge, as an alternative of simply giving it away totally free?

That’s a pleasant choice to have.