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.
Bhanu and his team built approximately 50 free tools to attract search traffic, each linked back to SiteGPT.
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu can now create a new free marketing tool in less than 5 minutes by referencing existing tools.
Bhanu filters Ahrefs keyword results to show only those with a keyword difficulty below 10, making them realistic ranking targets for any decent website.
Bhanu sets a minimum search volume of 1,000 monthly searches when selecting keywords to target with free tools.
PropGPT averaged 20 downloads per day right after launching on the App Store through influencer marketing.
Eyal and Yali shut down all marketing and spent 4 months completely rebuilding PropGPT from scratch.
PropGPT has accumulated over 40,000 total downloads since launch.
PropGPT's large language model (AI) operating costs are just $20 per month, and the cost is continually falling.
Ad-based monetization works well for game apps where users spend extended time in-session, as seen with Grid and Wordle.
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