AI News roundup: Reddit to monetize its Data APIs, AI bots to expose corporate secrets, and more

(Image: Reuters)

Reddit's treasure trove of human conversations is no longer free for AI

A lot of companies use Reddit as a training ground for AI language models.

• Reddit launched its Data API seven years ago and provides academics, researchers and companies access to a huge number of human-to-human conversations, collected over 18 years. It serves as a treasure trove for companies looking to train AI models.
• In an interview to The New York Times, Reddit founder Steve Huffman said, "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable" and they did not "need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free".

The buzz around AI is fueling demand for hardware and chips

Advantest Corp is seeing a spike in demand for its chip-testing devices, catalysed by the frenzy of interest in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other novel uses of artificial intelligence.

• A global race to develop powerful computing clusters and next-generation AI training systems is spurring chipmakers to buy many more of the Tokyo-based company’s testing tools, Advantest Co-Chief Strategy Officer Yasuo Mihashi said in an interview.
• “We are the industry’s dominant player, so we benefit when something like ChatGPT expands uses of high-performance computing,” Mihashi told Bloomberg News in an interview.

Generative AI bots will expose corporate secrets says Israel-based venture firm

The widespread adoption of new AI chatbots and writing tools could leave companies vulnerable to data leaks and lawsuits, says Team8, an Israel-based venture firm.

• Major technology companies including Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc are racing to add generative AI capabilities to improve chatbots and search engines, training their models on data scraped from the Internet to give users a one-stop-shop for their queries. If these tools are fed confidential or private data, it will be very difficult to erase the information.
• The fear is that the chatbots could be exploited by hackers to access sensitive corporate information or perform actions against the company. There are also concerns that confidential information fed into the chatbots now could be used by AI companies in the future.