Yeah I’ve done a tiny bit of AI stuff for what I do (biology) and I think it’s very sus they can build such a strong model out of data which costs lots of money. The reason the algos in my field of biology are so strong is because the NCBI has the genomes of everything that’s be sequenced FOR FREE, because obviously you don’t want people patenting genomes and it should all be free for science, etc.

Which begs the question how the a start up that started out as a non-profit get that much user data and keep costs low? I know you can buy user data and I’m not sure how much it is to buy a bunch of google docs from a data broker, but if you buy from hackers who just data breached or used some illegal crawler you can probably cut that to prices a nonprofit could afford.