The Washington Post just published a really cool breakdown of where chatbot training data really comes from. It’s just one data set being studied here — Google’s C4, which is used by Meta’s LLaMa and some other models — but it reveals a lot about how LLMs learn from the web, and what they’re really learning.
The least surprising bit? There’s a whole lot of Wikipedia in there.
Netflix was never going to be a DVD shipper forever. But to win the streaming wars, it might need to recapture what made DVDs by mail so special.
That and other deep thoughts on the state of the tech industry, this week on The Vergecast! We talked all about HBODiscoveryMaxPlus, Twitter’s fights with NPR and Substack, our many feelings about CarPlay, and the future of cloud gaming at Sony. And then more feelings about CarPlay.
Listen, I’m just saying, CNN Airport would definitely be a better name for a streaming service than Max. We tried to figure out what’s next for this service, then looked into Twitter’s big fight with Substack, Sony’s cloud and mobile gaming plans, and more.
Also: Nilay is still wrong about CarPlay. That’s the main takeaway from this episode.
In our inaugural Vergecast Streaming Service Draft, HBO Max was the #2 pick — and that was before today’s big combination with Discovery. Give it a year, and this could absolutely be the service to beat. But good luck catching TikTok!
That’s the question the Vergecast crew tried to answer on this week’s episode. And that was before the Substack thing got even weirder. There’s no way of guessing what happens next with Twitter.
