AI Secrets is your weekly update on how AI is changing our everyday lives. Our experts will keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on the AI gold rush.Share this with anyone you want to keep up to date.
In an AI Gold Rush, be the Guy Selling the API 👷 ⛏️
Another week, another acronym. This week, the three letters that have everybody squabbling are not AGI, but API - Application Programming Interface. If you think of AI as a gold rush, then APIs are the shovels. Most big content-driven websites have an API, allowing developers easy access to their vast databases of human-created content - the gold which powers large language models - but in the last couple of months, the cost of buying access to these API shovels has skyrocketed. Take the social media site Reddit, which has seen an explosion in active users in recent years and is now substantially larger than Twitter. Reddit has just announced a huge rise in their API pricing and it’s fair to say its users are not happy about it.
For the unfamiliar, Reddit is broken down into “subreddits” focusing on specific categories, which are moderated by volunteers. It is also famous for having underwhelming software and relies heavily on its users to create third-party apps to make the site more usable. This is particularly important for the moderators who run the subreddits, who depend on those third-party tools to make their work easier.
Those third-party apps need to use the API to function. Christian Selig, developer of Apollo, one of the most popular Reddit apps, has said that the price hike means he will need to find a staggering $1.7m per month to sustain his operation, and he will be forced to close his app for good. The outcry is similarly huge, and on Tuesday a large amount of Reddit will be going on strike, with hundreds of moderators taking their subreddits private. They’ll still be accessible to existing subscribers, but crucially, they will not be accessible via the API. At the last count, those striking subreddits hold more than 800m subscriptions between them. Most are only going on strike for 48 hours but some are closing their doors indefinitely.
For years, people have been saying that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”, and you couldn’t ask for a more striking example of this than Reddit’s shovel sale. It’s strange to think that our posts about what we had for breakfast or the Game of Thrones finale have belatedly become the hottest thing in tech, but thanks to AI, that’s where all social media users now find themselves; successful influencers whose posts are now seen by the AI industry as gold.
To help you figure out how best to take advantage of your newly gilded status, make sure to check out our comprehensive - and extremely useful - glossary of AI terminology!
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