According to many experts, artificial intelligence will be a boom for productivity and efficiency-but only if quality data is provided. Tech giants including Meta (META) and Google (GOOG, GOOGLE) are take the lead and could very easily swallow up the smaller players in the sector, particularly in data monetization.
Brad Schneider, CEO of Nomad Data, explains how AI will turn data into dollars. Schneider notes that social media and online sites will instrument the first wave of data monetization, which involves the training of large linguistic models, while the second wave will focus on more specific, “narrower” models that perform functions unique.
Big tech companies are “the most data-hungry today,” Schneider says, saying they’re “building the tools” for what’s called the AI revolution. Schneider goes on to say that smaller companies will be able to innovate faster in AI.
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Editor’s note: This article was written by Eyek Ntekim
Video transcription
– Of course, the quality of AI depends on the quality of the data it is trained on, which means that tech giants, like Meta and Google, with a considerable advantage, can crush the smaller players. Our next guest says billions of dollars of data have been bought and sold in the last 12 months and expects that figure to double this year. But how does AI turn our data into dollars in the marketplace?
Well, to tell us more, Brad Schneider, CEO of Nomad Data, is here. Thank you for being with us this morning. So, as Akiko was mentioning, when people think about AI and data, it seems like an amorphous blob here. So what do we need to know about the kind of data that these big language models are trained on, and how does that data actually turn into dollars for some of these companies that want to use it?
BRAD SCHNEIDER: Of course. I mean, one of the biggest pioneers is just the media sites themselves. Many of these AI engines are trained on huge corpora of text. So companies like Yahoo, for example, and many other top media outlets are starting to license this data to train the biggest models, and that’s really going to be the driving force behind the first wave of this phenomenon. But the second wave is going to be more specific models, narrower models that people are putting in the hands of consumers where they’re there to perform a specific individual function, and that’s going to expand the scope of data needed for training. quite dramatically.
– And so obviously, there is a multitude of data, even more than ever thanks to large language models. So which companies or sectors are really leading the charge and getting the most out of it, particularly some of these larger companies that obviously have a lot more access to data?
BRAD SCHNEIDER: I mean, that’s an interesting question. Obviously, big companies, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropics, are behind the start of this revolution. They are therefore the most data-intensive today. But in reality, the size of these companies requires them to sell products to a very large number of people. So they build the tools. If you think about the gold rush, for example, the ones that sold picks and shovels were the biggest companies and the ones that kind of stood the test of time, and that’s what we’re seeing with these big tech companies.
But in reality, at least from my perspective, innovation is going to happen because of the people using these tools. So for a lot of these companies that you haven’t heard of, this is really going to allow small businesses to innovate and move much faster than a larger company for a variety of reasons. Most of these companies sell the infrastructure.
Microsoft, for example, cannot create a product that generates revenue of a million dollars per year. Their income is so huge that they have to sell something to everyone. So I think the real innovation will come from companies that you’ve heard less about, or maybe where you haven’t thought that AI could play a big role.
