Oh no I’ve been outed as Guardian tech journalist John Naughton

The absolute bazinga I’ve been shouting for over a week now!

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman told the New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Note the sleight of mind here. That “corpus of data” is the content posted by millions of Reddit users over the decades. It is a fascinating and valuable record of what they were thinking and obsessing about. Not the tiniest fraction of it was created by Huffman, his fellow executives or shareholders. It can only be seen as belonging to them because of whatever skewed “consent” agreement its credulous users felt obliged to click on before they could use the service. So it’s a bit rich to hear him complaining about LLMs which were – and are – being trained via the largest and most comprehensive exercise in intellectual piracy in the history of mankind. Or, to coin a phrase, it’s just another case of the kettle calling the slag heap black.