New York Times journalists published a stunning expose on internal machinations of OpenAI, Google, and Meta. Well worth a read.
The highlights include the following allegations:
- Allegedly, “OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos” to train GPT4, with President Greg Brockman participating in the YouTube video collection.
- Google allegedly “transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its A.I. models.”
- [N.B. I thought YouTube videos already enable automated transcripts. Perhaps there’s a reason for them to do the transcribing on their own? Not obvious to me.]
- Google allegedly “broadened its terms of service. One motivation for the change, according to members of the company’s privacy team and an internal message viewed by The Times, was to allow Google to be able to tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews on Google Maps and other online material for more of its A.I. products.”
- Meta allegedly “debated paying $10 a book for the full licensing rights to new titles. They discussed buying Simon & Schuster, which publishes authors like Stephen King, according to the recordings.”
- [The latter idea is a shocker, but typically book authors retain the copyrights to their works, so buying Simon & Schuster likely wouldn’t have helped Meta.]
The article was authored by Cade Metz, Cecilia Kang, Sheera Frenkel, Stuart A. Thompson, and Nico Grant.
