The Battle For The Data | Issue #18
The AI War is being fought on two fronts.
The Government Side and the Corporate Side.
Governments want to control chips, corporate companies want to control data.
Let's talk about the latter.
The raw material for AI is data.
AI is essentially a data guzzling beast.
Take for example, ChatGPT. How do you think it knows anything?
They sourced from books, articles, the web and they put together billions and billions of text.
And they fed ChatGPT with all of that.
Now the thing is somewhat obnoxious. Who is to blame?
So, the catch is:
Whoever has the better data, has the better AI.
Better = higher quantity + higher quality.
If you feed AI with trillions of pages of Nursery School essays, it'll only be good as that.
Data as power hasn't exactly been a new thing.
Since I watched that big data documentary on TV years ago, I have seen Big Tech differently.
Google is not an information business. Amazon is not an e-Commerce business. Meta is not an advertisement business.
They are data companies.
You use their product. They suck as much data about you and about how you use their product.
What they do with that data differs though.
Amazon uses it to know what type of products you buy, finds what others like you are buying and recommends them to you.
Google and Meta use your data to lure advertisers to showcase on their platform.
It is more complex than this, tho. And I won't talk about whether Big Tech sells your data to the government.
But, another thing Big Tech is using your data to do is to train AI models.
And the lawsuits have been coming in waves not ripples.
Following from our yesterday story, Elon figured that Big Tech was poised to win the data battle.
Google for example has the search characteristics of billions + emails. So much data.
What would be his striking move?
After acquiring Twitter, it dawned on him.
This (Twitter) is the repository of human lingo.
Google could crawl blogs and articles. This (Twitter) is the world's largest chat room.
The quantity: About 500 million posts and replies every single day.
The quality of data: Real talk. Real conversations by real people.
If AI ever wanted to truly understand how humans conversed, the nuances, the tiddy-iddies, it needed Twitter.
Now, X.
Elon Musk put up measures to close up X from AI models from Big Tech latching on to X and sucking posts to feed on.
It's the image for me.
Elon also realized that he also had another valuable treasure trove.
Tesla cars.
Thing is, Tesla cars record videos of the driver and the road. Billions of frames per day.
If you wanted to train an AI to navigate the real world, not disembodied chatting, you need something like that.
Elon knows what he has and he has wasted no time.
In fact, it seems he has moved faster than expected.
In just two months after the company was created, xAI launched a chatbot that accesses X's data in real-time.
He called it Grok.
Grok doesn't have an annoying knowledge cut-off.
Grok is continuously and continually trained. On autopilot.
Sweet. Sweet.
Days after Grok's release, OpenAI held it's Developer Conference. The updates from there have made people go crazy.
If I say I don't like the competition, I'd be crowned Liar of the Year.
When Microsoft picked OpenAI as it's sidekick and Google and Amazon pitched their tents with Anthropic, waters were very calm.
Elon Musk is playing an interesting, engaging third force character.
Let's keep watching this unfolding movie. Closely.
Prompt of the Day: Pros and Cons
Copy and paste this into ChatGPT:
Act as a keen strategist, and I want to achieve [GOAL]. Give me the most important pros and cons of [ACTION] in table format and use a scale (1-5) to weigh the benefits of the pros and the gravity of the cons.Tool of the Day
If you want to be an X power user, you can try Tweet Hunter. AI-powered content, engagement, automation and advanced scheduling features.
Did You Know
Seems more money is flowing. After Amazon's $4B bet on Anthropic, Google has also announced a $2B investment in Anthropic.
Image of the Day.
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Thank you for today.
Enjoy the rest of your day
With love and ink,
Emmanuel