No. OpenAI is suspected to be worth over $150B. They can absolutely afford to pay people for data.

Edit: People commenting need to understand that $150B is the discounted value of future revenues. So... yes they can pay out... yes they will be worth less... and yes that's fair to the people who created the information.

I can't believe there are so many apologists on HN for what amounts to vacuuming up peoples data for financial gain.

The OpenAI that is assumed to keep being able to harvest every form of IP without compensation is valued at $150B, an OpenAI that has to pay for data would be worth significantly less. They're currently not even expecting to turn a profit until 2029, and that's without paying for data.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/report-reveals-openais-44-bil...

OpenAI is not profitable, and to achieve what they have achieved they had to scrape basically the entire internet. I don't have a hard time believing that OpenAI could not exist if they had to respect copyright.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...

That's not real money tough. You need actual cash on hand to pay for stuff, OpenAI only have the money they've been given by investors. I suspect that many of the investors wouldn't have been so keen if they knew that OpenAI would need an additional couple of billions a year to pay for data.

That doesn’t mean they have $150B to hand over. What you can cite is the $10 billion they got from Microsoft.

I’m sure they could use a chunk of that to buy competitive I.P. for both companies to use for training. They can also pay experts to create it. They could even sell that to others for use in smaller models to finance creating or buying even more I.P. for their models.