When Meta debuted its new Threads function earlier this month, it was shortly dubbed “the Twitter killer.” Elon Musk, the proprietor of X (formerly Twitter), even threatened to sue Meta for what he known as a “copycat” product.

Launched off the again of Instagram, additionally owned by Meta, Threads seems similar to X. It’s scrollable, text-based, and character-limited. But why, when X has been notoriously unprofitable, would Meta—which introduced us the notorious “pivot to video” and has had its sights set on competing with TikTok—wish to tackle the platform? The reply could should do with synthetic intelligence.

Recent months have seen a veritable AI arms race, with instruments like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Copilot, Dall-E, and Google’s Bard all jockeying for customers. As extra corporations put money into generative AI, they want tons of information to coach their fashions. And that knowledge must be generated by precise people to ensure that the generative AI to look, properly, human. Platforms like Reddit and X are gold mines as a result of they host tens of millions of examples of user-generated content material. Both corporations have additionally traditionally made their knowledge available, a boon for third-party builders and researchers. In 2020 alone, knowledge from X contributed to greater than 17,000 analysis papers. Models like ChatGPT and Bard have been additionally skilled on knowledge from these platforms. But this has sparked greater questions on how a lot user-generated knowledge is price, and what it ought to price to entry. Now, that knowledge might not be available for lengthy, simply as each firm, together with Meta, is speeding to develop their very own fashions.

Earlier this yr, Musk introduced that X would start charging $42,000 a month for its API, pricing out practically everybody that used it, notably lecturers and researchers, for whom knowledge from X was essential for analysis into subjects like disinformation. Later, the corporate mentioned it will supply tiers of entry priced at $125,000 and $210,000 per 30 days. Not lengthy thereafter, Reddit introduced it will additionally begin charging for its API. In an interview with The New York Times, Reddit CEO Reed Huffman acknowledged that the “Reddit corpus of data is really valuable” for coaching AI fashions however that the corporate didn’t really feel the “need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

In the previous a number of months, Musk has continued to crack down on entry to X’s knowledge. In April, he tweeted that Microsoft had “illegally” used knowledge from X to coach its AI fashions (Microsoft is a accomplice with Meta and OpenAI, which created ChatGPT). A letter from X’s lawyer alleged that the corporate had exceeded the allowed use of the info it drew from the platform. Then, final month, Twitter introduced it will restrict the flexibility to see the location’s content material with out first logging in, and that to see extra that 600 tweets per day, customers would wish to pay for Twitter Blue. Musk known as it a “temporary emergency measure” to stop what he known as “data pillaging.” (XCorp, which owns X, filed a lawsuit shortly after towards 4 unnamed defendants, in search of $1 million in damages for knowledge scraping). As Musk has restricted entry to the platform, he has additionally launched his new xAI startup, which can be skilled on knowledge from X.

What does all this should do with Threads? Meta, which gambled its future—and its title—on the metaverse, has fallen behind in its funding in AI. But final week, the corporate announced it will be making its giant language mannequin, Llama 2, open supply, free for researchers and companies alike (this additionally means, nonetheless, it received’t have among the safeguards of ChatGPT, particularly the flexibility to revoke entry from customers who violate the phrases of use to generate, say, disinformation). Threads might bolster its efforts to get again within the AI sport, simply when X is not an choice for corporations in search of to reap knowledge.