How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. – The New York Times

Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest artificial intelligence systems.
Researchers at OpenAI’s office in San Francisco developed a tool to transcribe YouTube videos to amass conversational text for A.I. development.Credit…Jason Henry for The New York Times
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By Cade Metz, Cecilia Kang, Sheera Frenkel, Stuart A. Thompson and Nico Grant
Reporting from San Francisco, Washington and New York
In late 2021, OpenAI faced a supply problem.
The artificial intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the internet as it developed its latest A.I. system. It needed more data to train the next version of its technology — lots more.
So OpenAI researchers created a speech recognition tool called Whisper. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an A.I. system smarter.
Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube’s rules, three people with knowledge of the conversations said. YouTube, which is owned by Google, prohibits use of its videos for applications that are “independent” of the video platform.
Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos, the people said. The team included Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who personally helped collect the videos, two of the people said. The texts were then fed into a system called GPT-4, which was widely considered one of the world’s most powerful A.I. models and was the basis of the latest version of the ChatGPT chatbot.
The race to lead A.I. has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law, according to an examination by The New York Times.
Before 2020, most A.I. models used relatively little training data.
Mr. Kaplan’s paper, released in 2020, led to a new era defined by GPT-3, a large language model, where researchers began including more data in their models …
… much, much more data.
Note: Includes estimates. Source: Epoch.
Here are the changes Google made to its privacy policy last year for its free consumer apps.
Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s language AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.
Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s language AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.
Source: Google
By The New York Times
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