Snapshot · This Week in Tech (Audio)
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.
Where this was said
At 2:13:20 · 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.
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.
Ad-based monetization works well for game apps where users spend extended time in-session, as seen with Grid and Wordle.
Tool-focused apps like PuffCount are poor candidates for ad monetization because users don't stay in-session long enough.
A hard paywall is a screen that blocks all app features unless the user pays or starts a free trial — it cannot be dismissed.
Mobile apps are primarily monetized through either ads (best for games) or in-app purchases/subscriptions (best for tools).
According to the episode, YouTube outperforms every other social platform for building trust and driving SaaS conversions.
Vasco stated that the majority of his app's user base came directly from his YouTube channel.
SEO Bot features a 'Boost My Domain Rating' button that routes users directly to Listing Bot, an example of in-product cross-selling.
The founder's entire product portfolio is AI-related, making it easier to package products attractively for directories.
The founder attached their SaaS demo to the trending debate about whether AI coding is actually good enough to build a full SaaS product.
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