😺 Reddit's sexy data

PLUS: AI bubble? Yeah, no thx.

Welcome, humans.

My (Noah’s) great Uncle, who’s 72 and still wakes up at 6:30am every day to start his work day cause he loves it, told us that he reads The Neuron every single day to stay on the cutting-edge of AI.

Not all heroes wear capes, just sayin’! 🤷

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Reddit clinches a deal to license its data for $60M/year.
Adobe Acrobat integrates AI features into its PDF software.
The FTC proposed new rules to clamp down on AI deepfakes.
Investor demand for AI is hitting unprecedented levels.

Reddit makes $60M.

Training a chatbot is a bit like making Grandma’s chicken soup.

The basic ingredients, like chicken and carrots, represent all the available content on the internet. This part's a breeze—everyone's doing it.

However, it's the unique blend of spices that sets the outcome apart—for chatbots, this means finding exclusive datasets to train their models on.

In 2023, some publishers like X realized, “oh sh*t, our data is really fricken valuable for AI training.” So they paywalled/hid their data.

This left companies like OpenAI with a dilemma:

Use that data anyway (& get sued).
Fork over cash to publishers for access.

We’ve been seeing a lot of #2 lately—In December, OpenAI agreed to an eight-figure sum with Axel Springer for its news articles, and Apple is considering shelling out up to $50M for content licenses from news orgs.

Now, Reddit signed a $60M/yr contract with an AI company that’ll use its content for chatbot training.

“AI company” likely means OpenAI or Google.
And “its content” essentially means user-generated content. This move has unsurprisingly irked many Reddit users, who are now purging their past posts/comments in protest.

We’re not taking sides, but it's no secret that social media giants have a long history of profiting from user data:

Reddit User Agreement as of last week

Why it matters: The best chatbots have already eaten the internet. They’re worried that anyone can do this and catch up. To maintain their edge, they're on the hunt for fresh, exclusive data sources.

Anticipate more deals like this, possibly starting with $100M/year payments to The NYT from OpenAI, once they iron out the legalities (just our two cents).

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Achieve 5x lower costs than GPT-3.5-Turbo on OctoAI with Mixtral.

Here’s how one company slashed AI costs by 5x on OctoML:

Latitude Games created AI Dungeon, a fantasy role-playing game.

Before OctoML, Latitude used to shell out a ton of money on closed-source models from OpenAI for crafting AI adventures.

Now, they use Mixtral 8x7B on OctoML, the speediest and most cost-effective platform for deploying AI models.

Not only did Latitude see a 5x reduction in inference costs, but 75% of users favored the Mixtral model in gameplay.

Stop wasting money and start saving with OctoML today!

Wednesday Wirings (mega edition).

An AI bubble? Overheard from a (vegan) Palo Alto cafe: “Oh hell naw!”.

Investors, both big and small, can't get enough of AI, and there's no sign of it slowing down:

Nvidia's stock rose by 16.4% this month, hitting a market cap of $1.72T.
Arm, a British semiconductor firm, soared 57.92% this month.
Scale AI is eyeing a valuation of up to $14B for its next funding round.
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son plans to gather $100B for an AI chip venture.
Recogni, which designs AI compute solutions, raised $102M.
Rasa, a conversational AI platform for enterprises, secured $30M.
LangChain, a toolkit for building with AI, snagged $25M.
Clarity, which helps detect AI deepfake videos, raised $16M.
Rogo, an enterprise AI for financial institutions, raised $7M.
Dili, a YC-backed platform automating operations for PE/VC firms, raised $3.6M.
AIX Ventures raised a $202M fund for early-stage AI companies.

We curated the top 27 tools you need for work in our “Top Tools For Business”!

Around the Horn.

The FTC proposed new rules for AI deepfakes impersonating individuals & NY’s Governor wants to make "deceptive AI" illegal.
Deutsche Telekom unveiled a new phone concept eliminating apps, with AI handling all your tasks (this is the future, TBH).
Adobe announced new AI features in Acrobat that can summarize files, chat with documents, & more.
Andrej Karpathy posted a new lecture called “Let’s build the GPT Tokenizer.”