alt Hacker NewsWhat I still don't understand is who is doing it? I assume it's not the big companies like OpenAI or Google or Anthropic, right? So there are a bunch of small things out there doing the scraping and then they sell it to the big places? Or are these just smaller AI models doing the scraping and using it for themselves? Is there an underground ecosystem where people buy and sell this stuff? I understand why it's valuable to the AI companies I'm curious about how all this work, the economics of it all.
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We're currently in the middle of an AI goldrush. There are probably hundreds of companies trying to do model pretraining. Anthropic and OpenAI and so on probably care about optics and implementing their crawlers properly. But there will be many firms few of us have heard of. I would guess some of them are Chinese, for example.
Some people making money off it, it's a whole value chain:
- Residential proxy providers
- Hosting providers with IP-rotation as a service.
- Hosting providers who chase AI training customers, DigitalOcean is a big one
- Clouds like AWS with headless browsing as a service
- Platforms like Replit whose value proposition starts to fall apart if clients can't make requests from their platform.
- Companies like meta, whose existing bots are now obviously completely unchained from their advertised responsibilities
As I understand, most large companies now are relying on a variety of contractors and the constractors try to vacuum up everything so they have the maximum to sell to different companies.
This is the way for companies these days to avoid legal responsibility for their actions - hire a contractor on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis.
Of course such things are extra-ironic in the context of US companies complaining about having their condensed by Chinese companies.
Edit: I read this in one article a while back. I can't links either corroborating or refuting it now and I think that's again because whatever the companies do, they want to keep it hush-hush.
Can't speak for everyone. I'm very gently scraping a lot of libraries for public domain periodical scans. The scans often exist nowhere else, or not in the same quality. Sometimes I find a certain library has perhaps the only known remaining intact copy of a periodical or a specific page.
The problem with the libraries is that all these scans are behind walls, so while the texts are public domain nobody can easily access them. I'm trying to liberate them and re-upload them outside the walls.
Until recently a lot of libraries would allow you to remotely sign up for a library card, but in the last 12 months almost all of them have reverted to having to bring ID in person to the library to validate your account, which puts the brakes on things.