Where do data streams fit in your business strategy?

This week Reddit mods have been taking their communities private to protest recent changes to the company's API policy. The heart of the matter? Reddit wants to charge more money to allow outside companies to access their data.

For businesses, this is a harbinger of what's to come. AI systems like ChatGPT and Midjourney perform well because they are trained on an enormous corpus of data like you would find on Reddit. When that data is taken away (or made prohibitively expensive to use), the AI models won't perform as well.

Is your business prepared to pay more for higher quality AI models?

To some degree, this is already happening. Earlier this year, Bloomberg launched BloombergGPT, a large language model specifically trained around financial data, finance language and is meant to enhance the workflow of folks in the financial industry. They've realized that not only are the needs of their industry unique, but that AI presents a unique opportunity to monetize the data they already own.

Other businesses like Apple, JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Amazon and Accenture have all banned or blocked ChatGPT use in the workplace over fears that their private data will leak and be used for free by other AIs.

Even if you're building a proprietary AI solution, you might not be aware of your cloud vendors' AI policy. For example, AWS states their AI software "might store and use customer content processed by those services for the development and continuous improvement of other AWS services." AWS does provide a means for you to opt-out of that policy, but does this imply that the default option for everyone is automatic opt-in?

The upside to all of this is that AI models are providing a potential way to monetize your company's data or use it as the foundation for future AI products in your specific industry or area of expertise.

But is that part of your current business strategy?

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