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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

Fresh human data feeds at scale are always going to be valuable.

   - Meta has its own
   - Reddit is monetizing its
   - Twitter was bought for its
   - MS is trying to create one
   - Amazon has a funhouse mirror version (reviews)

Apple seems oddly without a dance partner, but I'm guessing they figure they can leverage pre-built / open models for the features they're targeting.

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> Fresh human data feeds at scale are always going to be valuable.

I don't disagree with this but this is a losing battle assuming the perpetual cat-and-mouse game of web scraping continues to lean to the scrapers.

To beat it means raising the walls of the gardens, making "data deals," hoping users don't move to the next thing, and aggressively protecting data via third party legal action.

This all strikes me as a very vulnerable and complicated moat.

Apple has iCloud at minimum, to use as a training data. Maybe will get other partnerships later.

They do, though using it as training data for a model cuts against their privacy-first branding.

I don't see a way Apple engineers its way out of that -- but they won't need to if open source models are good enough, or if capable models remain accessible (e.g. not first-party locked).

Ironically, it looks a lot like the Maps situation again...

Well, Apple being privacy-first concept is entirely in our heads. They are relatively more pro-privacy, but I wouldn't call them privacy-first, just like any other corporation. There is maybe a handful of such companies in the world, like Signal, Tuta or Proton.

Also let's not forget how corporations invent doublespeak and twist meanings. For example Apple may not resell private data but use it internally. Or it may use it internally only processed by scripts, and claim it is private because other human never saw it. Many other terminology manipulations can be invented if a stake is a few billions in cash.

They seem to have gone to a lot of actual technical, infrastructure-level complexity in their cloud AI approach, if it were lip service.

I expect, if they do find they need it, they'll pitch it as an opt-in paid feature.

Pay us for these extra capabilities, and know that we're training on your data.

Every single one of those is flooded with bots and spam.

That there are bots and spam doesn't matter: what matters is that the human content to noise ratio is greater than alternatives.

Which it is.

The public web is going to turn into even more of a dumpster fire once genai is fully digested by spammers. (Which is to say, once a 14 year old in a random country with third world GDP per capita can use it at scale)

SEO and spammers will gain big in GenAI, because now the SEO spam is encoded into the model and guess what the model will produce when lay person asks for best 5 of X, top 10 of Y questions? From my observation, lay person do not understand the SEO/spam games, they search for something, take the top result and treat it as holy gospel. With the new studies we see frequently(few posted here in HN last few months), people do not question “the internet”(soon to be the AI/LLM).

Just my 2c.

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