Podbit · This Week in Tech (Audio)
AI companies scraped the entire internet — copyright content and all — to train their models. Now Cloudflare is blocking those bots, but the theft already happened. What's left is a world where publishers can't get their content back, the training data for future models is shrinking, and AI companies are betting on billion-dollar settlements.
Where this was said
At 2:11:50 · chapter starts 2:06:40
Leo introduces the NYT story on Chinese AI catching up, which he connects to his own experience using ZAI's GLM model and running the Chinese Qwen open-weight model locally for facial recognition on his home security cameras. Jason explains model distillation [1] — Jason Hiner "They're just distilling those models, stealing from the thieves." 2:17:07 : Chinese labs run billions of queries against US frontier models like Claude and GPT, map how they respond, and then replicate those patterns at a fraction of the training cost — 'stealing from the thieves,' as he puts it, since the US models themselves were trained on scraped data. The panel debates whether this threatens US AI dominance long-term, with Jason arguing that because Chinese labs can copy models quickly and cheaply, the only sustainable moat for American AI companies is brand, not model capability.
Reports suggested that GPT-3 may have been trained on data that was 30–40% sourced from Reddit, illustrating the scale of web scraping that powered early AI models.
Game apps keep users engaged long enough for ads to pay off. Tool apps don't — so if you're building a utility, ads are almost always the wrong call and subscriptions are your only real lever.
Inside SEO Bot, a single button labelled 'Boost My Domain Rating' routes users directly to Listing Bot. That one interaction converts a user of one tool into a user of two — without any marketing cost.
Directory listings are a powerful but underrated growth channel — but only if your product is genuinely interesting enough to earn the click. AI products have a natural advantage here because they're easy to package in a compelling, clickable way.
The fastest path to Twitter growth isn't volume — it's forming sharp opinions about how the platform works and sharing them immediately. People cluster around those who understand the rules and say so out loud.
Sam had no coding knowledge, so he used ChatGPT voice mode to generate his entire codebase and copy-pasted it into Notepad. A friend later introduced him to Cursor, and he never looked back.
Copy days of Discord chat history, paste it into ChatGPT, and ask it to list recurring pain points. The ones that come up most often are your best product bets.
Sam's top advice: when prompting Cursor, tell it to architect code for 100,000 users from day one. The AI changes its approach, building scalable frameworks instead of brittle one-user code.
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu replicates an existing free tool for a new keyword in under 5 minutes. What used to be a multi-day build is now a lunch-break task.
Ahrefs, SiteGPT, Cal.com, PostHog, Datafast, Sibyl AI, Bento, Feather, Featurepace, Mintlify, Cloud Code, ChartMogul — Bhanu runs his entire business solo with these 12 tools.
We use essential and analytics cookies to run Vuci. To understand how the site is used: Privacy Policy.
Install Vuci on your phone
Add it to your home screen for a faster, app-like experience.
Install Vuci on your phone
Tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”.
A new version is available
Reload to get the latest Vuci.