Alistair Barr

By now, most major online content creators realize tech companies have been using their copyrighted work for years to train AI models without permission or payment.Some of these content owners are taking action, and even beginning to have success in stopping this activity.The New York Times discovered that Common Crawl, one of the largest AI training datasets, contained millions of URLs linking to its paywalled articles and other copyrighted content.Common Crawl was built by scraping most of the…

“Live experiences are the new luxury good,” Kevin Hartz said in 2013 when Eventbrite, the ticketing startup he cofounded, got a big new funding round.By that point, modern factories, supply chains, and Amazon had boiled down “stuff” to a commodity. You can now buy an overwhelming variety of tennis shoes, or spatulas, or sweatpants online. This abundance has taken much of the satisfaction away from purchasing physical things. This is why experiences, which by definition are finite, became more va…

In June, we told you about a startup mass extinction event that was just beginning.Four months later, this wave of shutdowns is rising fast, and it’s beginning to drag on the cloud sector.212 startups went bankrupt or dissolved in some other way during the third quarter, according to data from Carta, which tracks startup shutdowns closely.This doesn’t capture all the closures as not every startup is a client of Carta. But the rate of change is notable. So far this year, Carta has seen 543 startu…

When you’re building a house, you can do it in various ways. You can build all the tools you need and then hike into a forest to chop down wood and turn that into your final structure. Or, you can go to Home Depot and buy wood that’s already been chopped down, along with all the nails, hammers and other equipment you need.Or, you can pay a contractor to do most of the work. Over the past 15 years, Amazon Web Services became the go-to contractor for anyone wanting to build something online. A web…

Earlier this week, the FTC filed a 172 page antitrust complaint against Amazon. The response was a giant shrug. ”*yawn*,” Bernstein Research sales specialist Mark Schlisky wrote in a note to investors the morning after. “You know how many inbounds I fielded yesterday on this particular issue? Zero.“His advice: Invest in companies that are accused of being monopolies. US antitrust law is mostly about consumer prices. Have prices for regular people gone up due to a company’s market dominance? FTC…

Powerful AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, are being bombarded by digital bots that are “extracting intelligence” in new and nefarious ways.The phenomenon was spotted recently by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a startup that helps developers build websites that integrate with many of the biggest AI models.He discussed this new breed of bot on the No Priors podcast with venture capitalists Elad Gil and Sarah Guo.“It’s almost like, extracting intelligence,” Rauch said. “Let’s call it web scraper…

When your conference leads to one of the biggest AI startup acquisitions ever, you probably want to organize another event soonish.This is exactly what’s happening. Cerebral Valley, an AI conference run by Eric Newcomer’s eponymous publication, just announced its second gathering of 2023.CVAI2 (Cerebral Valley AI Summit version 2.0) will take place on November 15 at the SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. The neighborhood is nicknamed Cerebral Valley these days, due to the plethora of…

Earlier this year, ChatGPT usage suddenly fell. ChatGPT was supposed to be the fastest-growing tech product in history, so this reversal got the technosphere theorizing as to why the chatbot wasn’t so hot anymore.One hypothesis stood out: Millions of students went on summer break, so they didn’t need ChatGPT to cheat — er, I mean research. The summer is over now, school is back in session, and the data confirms this theory. Similarweb tracks weekly visits to OpenAI’s ChatGPT website and traffic…

Years before ChatGPT, Nick Vincent was studying how much AI relies on human-generated data. One thing always struck him about the researchers and tech companies behind these powerful models.“They always highlight their clever algorithms, not the underlying data,” said Vincent, an assistant professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver.That’s beginning to change as the question of what data is used for AI, and the value of that information, becomes a hot topic.Giant mod…

Nvidia is selling boatloads of GPUs. Great!Someone has to pay for these incredibly expensive chips. Not so good.Nvidia’s CEO just put a price tag on this, and it’s a shocker. Late on Wednesday, Jensen Huang predicted $1 trillion will be spent in 4 years on upgrading data centers for AI (GPUs being a big part of that). He even broke it down to the annual cost.“There’s about $1 trillion worth of data centers, call it, a quarter of a trillion dollars of capital spend each year,” he said.A lot of th…