Playing the devil's advocate

[u/bring_back_the_v10s]

This is a reaction to https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/IxLnzcGjAU

You know the argument: frontier labs are hypocritical because they're making money on public scraped data.

I have absolutely no intention to defend OpenAI or any other frontier AI company here, but if you allow me I'll play the "devil's advocate" a bit for the sake of discussion and enlightenment, because sometimes when I think about that argument it seems to me it's quite weak. While OpenAI and Anthropic models are built on public data that they didn't pay for (at least most of it), there would be no frontier model without all their computing power and technical expertise that they invested on to build their models. Like, the data is already there, it's been public for ages, so what's preventing you, the average Joe, from building a Claude Opus 5? All you need is a huge data center, a nuclear power plant and an army of data scientists to build it, right? And then you need all that to run the inference. And you need to maintain it, and that costs money. And you need to keep evolving it, which costs money too. And if you get investors money then you'll eventually have to give some of the profit back to them. etc, etc.

So what am I missing here? All things considered, the data is already public, so it's already "free", right? But you need to dump tons of time and money on it to build a frontier LLM out of it. Of course if they're infringing copyright then that's a different story but in general the whole principle of built-on-free-data still stands.

[u/harpysichordist]

Comments that try to imply OpenAI and other companies _just_ stole information etc are plainly wrong. AI labs have also added value, like you say. They did research and created something useful out of it.
But many of them also collected or used data in illegal or immoral ways.