Imagine what if because of some post you wrote years ago in reddit, stackexchange, your own blog, etc., you are able to take a cut from the revenue that is being made by o3 or sonnet or hosted service providers of open-source LLMs. If human-generated data in internet is the fossil fuel for reaching AGI, humans need to be able to extract value captured in proportion to their contribution. Instead what happens now is > big tech pay lumpsum to build datasets and strap a license > build a foundation model > strap an API to charge $/month or $ per N tokens > make revenue, raise $10s or $100s B private valuations, share prices rise The human OGs whose data was critical don’t get anything from these behemoth value captures. Naysayers might say “oh we now use synthetic data for training because we find AI superior to humans”. But bro you are just using bigger models made previously from human data to make synthetic data for preparing smaller but smarter models. That just means that the smaller model wouldn’t have existed without the former model and by geneology, the OG human data. Again, human OGs deserve to see a portion of value captured in their wallet. With RLHF being getting more critical for post-training, users are being asked to press thumbs up or down in chatbot interfaces. This preference is being used to improve the model even further which is then used to charge more $/month or $ per N tokens for next edition of LLM. Yet you, yeah you human users, aren’t able to see any of those value passed on to your wallet. It is obvious that having access to advanced GPUs and fossil fuel of human data has been critical for building the most competitive LLM offerings. Yet only shareholders of tsmc, nvidia, google, etc. and vcs, angel investors of openai, anthropic, etc., are getting all value capture. Normie humans whose digital footprint was used end up getting peanuts. Regardless of whatever date the AI pundits or modern-day philosophers have been setting for achieving AGI, the road to AGI is being paved with thievery of property rights of humans on their data or digital actions. Not saying I have the solution but here is the biggest prompt: how do we build a data market without a counter-party risk that is able to continuously measure the contribution of each unit of digital action by a human towards any commercial model’s value capture and share the royalty back to the human? Imagine this being there, we will have a pipeline where any of these behemoths can use human data to make better and better models while also ensuring normie human can harvest due payout from their digital actions. What an wonderful world that will be! Fair allocation. Just a late friday musing!