scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/3dn9y0.md

[BST] Leave your expertise at your work

• Author: u/None *

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• Score: 17

• Created: 2015-07-17T17:33:02

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u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+20] Utopian Smut Peddler (12 hours later)

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (31 minutes later)

Back in the '90s I started to write a story (before I realized that I wasn't actually good at writing stories) with this kind of theme. In this story, the skills belonged to a separate artificial "work persona" that was managed by an implant that basically took over the ego and tied new memories to that persona being present... there was no association chain for the original persona to access them. Lots of handwaving, and it's been 20 years so I forget the details now.

This persona started out being identical to you. It was technically an organically-assisted AI, and was legally part of the implant, and had access to resources in the implant... but it had no continuity of personality or consciousness apart from when it was activated in the brain it was implanted in. It was aware of your life outside, because your regular memories continued to lay down without whatever tags or whatever tied them to the implant.

With the implant off, you really didn't even think about your job, you went into work, you got switched off for 8 hours, and you went home. Theoretically, it's supposed to be like you turn on the implant, the new memories "come back", but you're still the same person. After all, the processing is going on in the same brain. You work for 8 hours, and then the extra memories and skills go away, but you're still you.

But eventually the implant stopped being able to find associations for memories laid down while offline, it's non-work life became dreamlike, and then lost. Now you have a version of you that sees losing the job as an existential crisis...

u/None [+3] (9 hours later)

But, the version of yourself that sees losing the job as a self-imperiling proposition is only conscious while on the job; it would be potentially possible to quit while not running the implant. In that case, the job-persona would know, and work out ways to prevent its own destruction...
Hey this is neat. It would be fun to have a narrative from either perspective, or both.

u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (39 minutes later)

A somewhat similar idea occurs in the short story (and movie) "Paycheck". That's a more indiscriminate form of memory-wipe, but it's implied that this has taken the place of (or is a more extreme version of) an NDA.

u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)

A funny inversion of reality. A military blog I like follow sums the real state of affairs as: "You can't classify math."

It is absolutely disheartening how man science fictionish seeming military technologies copied by competitors can be summed up as; once they knew that we could do it they started doing the math, cribbing the papers our researchers wrote, and the like.

TLDR Oppenheimer knew what he was talking about

u/ajuc [+2] (4 days later)

This means human clouds should be a thing. Employees are a commodity, characterized only by processing power, short-term memory capacity, and ability to focus.

Companies store decades-long thought processes that were run on dozens of employees through the history of company. In fact, they run these thought processes 24 hours/day jumping between people in different timezones.

u/darkflagrance [+1] (4 hours later)

You could have a system where people work the time they would normally spend asleep, and have their brains jacked into an AI or have an AI module that feeds info, stimulants, and other hormones to the brain. In this future, we can offload and reload memories, but we cannot yet create a structure as capable of learning and as cheap as a human brain. Perhaps the AI personalities are all long-dead human "uploads" who only live when their hosts are at work, and generally ignore what their original host was like. They might even switch bodies constantly as necessary.

u/BoilingLeadBath [+1] (7 hours later)

Well, if this is just a way that companies can be run, then because working at a company which adopts this technology massively stunts an employee's long-term earning potential, such companies have to pay substantially more than other similar companies.

I do not expect this would actually become a mainstream thing to do, given a society which starts out without any such companies; most companies produce a product which can easily be reverse-engineered or obtained through espionage, so the protection of IP wouldn't justify the employee cost.

If, however, this technology is standard:

The skill-data becomes something which is negotiated for in employment contracts. There's no reason to think that the only options are "work normally and keep all your skills" and "we keep everything and you never get it back".

People could steal their own skill-file and either use it at home (onloading it, working, then offloading it to avoid detection) or flee to a country which doesn't honor these laws.

Since a company could sell a skill-file, there's actually a reason for companies to hire complete noobs: after working with them for a couple years, they are now a valuable (and captive) product.

However, academia would have trouble paying for these skills, so I suspect that many of the best instructors and textbook authors don't exist. Industry complains even more than it already does that nobody learns anything from college.

Productivity of people working from home is massively reduced, so a much smaller open-source programming community.

Similarly, the engineers don't remember anything from their work, so there's fewer really awesome things on youtube.

Similarly, public policy debates are even worse than they are now.

u/noggin-scratcher [+2] I am a happy tree (8 hours later)

because working at a company which adopts this technology massively stunts an employee's long-term earning potential, such companies have to pay substantially more than other similar companies

I feel like there's another stable equilibrium where everyone does it, anyone that didn't do it would be put at a disadvantage because all their employees would be poached away, and for the employee it means you really don't want to change job, because it means starting to build your experience from scratch. You covered that... and I need to read more closely before commenting.

And now I'm picturing a story where someone gets hired at a basic entry-level position only to discover that they've actually been re-hired (let's say they have an implant that stores memories that can only be unlocked with the right employer-provided crypto key, so they aren't deleted when you leave, just rendered inaccessible, and if you return they're re-enabled... and also the memory of having ever worked there is part of the protected set).

So maybe in a former phase of their life they were higher up in the company until they learned inconvenient secrets or got ejected by cut-throat corporate politics, and now they're a janitor with those secrets, using them to take revenge.

u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)

I dislike dystopias, but you should write this

Also I see a small non skill lock company quickly steamrolling competition in this world, because they hire motivated people who think about their work after work.

u/FishNetwork [+1] (2 days later)

This means that every time I'd hire someone, I'd be getting a completely fresh trainee. There'd be no way to staff a team with mid-career professionals.

I think I'd look for 2 things to happen:

1. I'd ask my company to sign a reciprocity agreement with some similar but non-competing companies. Stay in network? Keep your skills.
2. I'd put a lot more research into training to minimize ramp-up time.

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