Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

That's a tiny drop in the bucket of the value these AI companies have appropriated from society.

Just to give an idea of the scale of it:

Let's say a modern SOTA LLM has 1T params and is therefore trained on 100T tokens

1000 tokens of text = 750 words of prose, which may take 15 min to 3hr to write (Gemini's estimate)

1000 tokens of code = 50-70 lines of code, which may take 15min to 5hr to write

We just want a rough estimate of the value of this, so let's say that 1000 tokens took 1hr of human labor to generate at an average wage of $50/hr

So, if 1000 tokens cost $50 of human labor, then that 100T of training data cost $5T.

So, the value of what the AI companies took from society might better be estimated in the trillions of dollars, not billions.

And of course what they are doing with all this data is building generative AI, so it's not just the value of what they took, but more importantly the future opportunity they are stealing from everyone by replacing human labor with their automaton who's profits they intend to keep for themselves.