virgin media startup business plan

• Recommended Links
• Voom Fibre Business Broadband - get speeds up to 1000 Mbps
• Looking for help?
• Customer Area

ABOUT VIRGIN MEDIA BUSINESS

Our initiatives, innovation, disruption, realisation....

As the largest business-to-business Virgin brand, we’re passionate about business and supporting businesses. And when we say ‘passionate’, we mean we’re prepared to put our money where our mouth is and support start-ups and disruptors with investment, advice, peer-to-peer support and mentoring. As Richard Branson said: “Why do I invest in start-ups? Because they are the job creators and innovators of the future. I am delighted to see so many entrepreneurs taking their start-ups to the next level and transforming the way we do business. These businesses not only have the potential to become a vital source of employment, innovation and productivity to economies, they are a shining example to younger generations that creativity, passion and hard work can change the world for the better.”

“Why do I invest in start-ups? Because they are the job creators and innovators of the future.”

Richard branson.

Virgin Media Business’s #VOOM is the UK’s biggest and most valuable pitch competition. Business start-ups and companies on the verge of growth from across the UK compete to pitch to Rich and the chance to win a share of £1million.

Virgin StartUp

Virgin StartUp is a not-for-profit Virgin company for entrepreneurs and provider of government-backed StartUp Loans and one-to-one business advice. StartUp loans range from £500 to £25,000 and the free advice includes a Business Plan Template and a hand-picked mentor.

About Virgin quick links

Leadership team, our technology, technical partners, cable my business, our initiatives, corporate responsibility, our offices, customer reviews, our scope partnership, press releases.

• 02 Oct | Homemade vegan health food company, Project Jackfruit, crowned Birmingham winner of Virgin Media Business Voom Pitch competition
• 04 Dec | Virgin Media Business Reveals Top 10 Most Disruptive Private UK Businesses
• 09 May | Virgin Media Business brings Voom Fibre to Manchester’s city centre

→ View Press Release archive

Learn more about our innovation initiatives, ready, steady, grow.

Ready, Steady, Grow with Virgin StartUp is a programme of activities developed to support entrepreneurs from across Greater London

Virgin StartUp Business Plan Template

Download a free copy of the Virgin StartUp Business Plan Template.

#VOOM 2016 Finalists

Learn about the young businesses that knocked our judges’ socks off.

Our Products

• Winter Sale

Broadband Deals

Other Stuff

• Sign into My Virgin Media
• What to Watch
• Help & Support

Broadband Only Deals

Broadband & Phone Deals

Broadband & TV Deals

Broadband, TV & Phone Deals

Student Broadband Deals

Fibre Broadband Deals

Broadband Speed Test

Broadband Postcode Checker

TV Packages

Stream from Virgin Media

Landline Deals

Compare All Broadband Deals

Broadband & SIM Deals

Broadband for Low Income Families

Business broadband

Refer a Friend

Shop Mobile Plans

Virgin Mobile

Pay Monthly Phones

Pay Monthly SIMs

Shop O2 Plans

SIM Only Deals

Pay As You Go SIMs

Shop Apple on O2

Apple iPhone

Apple Watch

Apple AirPods

Shop Brands on O2

Samsung Galaxy

Google Pixel

Sony Xperia

OPPO Phones

Your Basket

Boosting business.

Our 2020 goal: Create the opportunities for 100,000 small businesses to grow through digital.

Why this is important to us

We know that harnessing the power of digital technology can help unlock growth and generate wealth. Small businesses already contribute over half of all private sector turnover in the UK [1]. With the right support, small businesses can continue to create jobs, contribute to local communities and help drive digital competitive advantage for the UK. We have been enabling small businesses to unleash their digital potential and drive business growth through inspiration, education and peer-to-peer support. How we’re making it happen VOOM is our way of boosting the UK economy by creating opportunities for 100,000 small businesses to grow through digital. Since 2010, VOOM has grown to become a unique and powerful community of entrepreneurs and small business owners who come together with Virgin Media to make connections, share their expertise, find peer-to-peer support and compete for their chance to pitch to Sir Richard Branson. The community has been packed with great advice from successful startups, business leaders and leading brand partners like Virgin StartUp, Crowdfunder.co.uk, Paypal and LinkedIn. Virgin Media Business has driven this initiative forward until it’s completion in 2019 and Peter Kelly, Managing Director of Virgin Media Business is the executive sponsor for this goal. The three areas we focus on:

• Boosting the speed of business: In 2017, Virgin Media Business launched VOOM Fibre, to become the only provider in the market to offer its top speed of 350Mbps as standard.
• After learning that the average employee loses 15 minutes a day to slow internet speeds [1], we went a step further introducing a new speed of up to 500Mpbs, the fastest widely available speed in the market [2]
• Building connections that really matter: The VOOM Pioneers digital platform provided a place for small business owners to meet like-minded entrepreneurs and potential business partners
• Getting ahead: From humble beginnings in 2011, VOOM Pitch competition has grown to become the UK and Ireland’s biggest pitching competition giving entrepreneurs the chance to pitch to Sir Richard Branson and giving away over millions of pounds worth of prizes over the last five years

2019 performance

• Supported 14,089 small businesses to grow through digital
• We proudly hit out 2020 target a year early, so in 2019 we focussed on continued support for the VOOM community and started planning future activity

These are our performance highlights for 2019, the final year of our 2020 Boosting Business goal. If you are looking for information on our 2019 activity, take a look at the full report .

2020 reflections

• Over the last five years we’ve supported 127,036 small businesses to grow through digital
• From 2010, VOOM grew into a unique and powerful community of small business owners sharing their expertise, finding peer-to-peer support and completing for their final chance to pitch to sir Richard Branson. Since launch, 15,162 members have used the VOOM Pioneers digital platform to start conversations, offer advice and meet at face-to-face events we’ve hosted.
• In the last five years the community has been packed with opportunities to network and get great advice from successful start-ups, business leaders and leading brand partners like Virgin Start-Up, Crowdfunder.co.uk, Paypal and LinkedIn.
• We launched a revamped digital platform in 2016 to allow crowd funding alongside voting with support from Crowdfunder. This raised over £1.1m for VOOM entrants. During Global Entrepreneurship Week. During Global Entrepreneurship Week event in 2016, we set a new Guinness World Record with 160 businesses pitching non-stop for 29 hours.
• In 2017 and 2018 we completed a VOOM bus tour of the UK. We visited over 40 different cities (some year on year) and offered over 4,000 one-to-one consultancy sessions.
• In 2018, we held the last annual VOOM Pitch to Rich competition with more than 3,500 businesses vying for a chance to pitch to Sir Richard Branson and win a share of a £1 million prize fund.
• Over the years, Virgin Media has invested millions of pounds in prize funds to support innovative small businesses across the country.
• In 2017, Virgin Media launched Voom Fibre – a new superfast broadband service designed to help small businesses thrive.
• While we surpassed our nominal target with more than a year to go - and are proud to have supported so many small businesses to grow - we haven’t been able to effectively capture the specific impacts we’ve had on the businesses we supported through VOOM or tell a bigger socio-economic impact story as we’d originally intended to do.
• As we revisit the basics of the Theory of Change methodology for our next strategy, we’ve realised that going forward we must ensure a structure for capturing data on the impact of our interventions, not just the reach, is established from the outset.

What’s next

• We’ll continue to deliver social and economic impact through the services and opportunities we’re creating for small businesses with ways to better understand our impact in place.

[1] Combined annual turnover of SMEs was £2 trillion. Business population estimate for the UK and regions: 2018 statistical report, Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (DBIS) [2] A small business with eight employees used for illustrative purposes only. Eight people losing 15 minutes for five days equals 600 minutes, or ten hours of time, lost. According to the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, businesses with 0-9 employees account for 96% of all UK businesses. Virgin Media Business Digital Opportunities report, 2016[3] Speed claim: The UK’s fastest major business broadband provider based on VOOM Fibre 350Mbps vs major UK B2B ISPs max: 314Mbps BT; 80Mbps O2; 76Mbps Plusnet; 76Mbps TalkTalk; and 76Mbps Vodafone. Virgin Fibre areas only

We value every paper writer working for us, therefore we ask our clients to put funds on their balance as proof of having payment capability. Would be a pity for our writers not to get fair pay. We also want to reassure our clients of receiving a quality paper, thus the funds are released from your balance only when you're 100% satisfied.

We suggest our customers use the original top-level work we provide as a study aid and not as final papers to be submitted in class. Order your custom work and get straight A's.

Connect with the writers

Once paid, the initial draft will be made. For any query r to ask for revision, you can get in touch with the online chat support available 24X7 for you.

Customer Reviews

Customer Reviews

How do I place an order with your paper writing service?

Finished Papers

Finished Papers

We are quite confident to write and maintain the originality of our work as it is being checked thoroughly for plagiarism. Thus, no copy-pasting is entertained by the writers and they can easily 'write an essay for me’.

Definitely! It's not a matter of "yes you can", but a matter of "yes, you should". Chatting with professional paper writers through a one-on-one encrypted chat allows them to express their views on how the assignment should turn out and share their feedback. Be on the same page with your writer!

Free essays categories

Finished Papers

Artikel & Berita

Write my essay for me, standard essay helper.

Bennie Hawra

• Our Listings
• Our Rentals
• Testimonials
• Tenant Portal

4 reasons to write my essay with us!

You are always welcome to check some of our previously done projects given on our website and then judge it for yourself. Apart from that, we can give you 4 significant reasons to be a part of our customer base:

• Only professional ‘my essay writer', who are highly qualified and a master in their academic field, will write for you
• Quality control is rigorously maintained by us and is thoroughly aligned with the given question brief and instructions.
• We will also provide you with a thorough Plagiarism report by the Turnitin software which will ensure the originality of the draft
• You are free to revise your draft with us till you are contented with the subject matter.

Niamh Chamberlain

Tinggalkan Balasan Batalkan balasan

Alamat email Anda tidak akan dipublikasikan. Ruas yang wajib ditandai *

Is my essay writer skilled enough for my draft?

Customer Reviews

How It Works

Where are they now? Saint Luke

Virgin StartUp launched back in 2013 – for the full story of why, check out Richard Branson’s blog . Since then, it has supported some incredible founders to grow amazing businesses. In celebration of Virgin StartUp’s 10th anniversary, we’re catching up with some of the founders who received support in the early days to learn about their start-up journey.

Tessa Holladay launched Saint Luke back in 2015. We had a chat with her about her business journey since then…

What’s Saint Luke’s 30-second elevator pitch?

Saint Luke embodies the essence of island life, catering to globetrotters and adventure seekers alike. Established in 2015, our Caribbean-inspired menswear label made waves with its signature canvas holdalls, boasting a striking fusion of vibrant hues and exotic patterns. Since inception, we’ve embarked on an enriching journey, broadening our repertoire to encompass an array of summer essentials such as swimwear, t-shirts, outerwear, linen shirts, and shorts, all infused with the brand's unwavering tropical fervour.

The latest milestone in our voyage is the opening of our inaugural boutique on the sun-kissed shores of Barbados' west coast. Infused with inspirations drawn from travel and cultural encounters, our collections conjure the blissful, carefree ambiance of tropical island escapades, beckoning you to embrace the rhythm of rum-filled glasses and sand between your toes.

Why did you choose Virgin StartUp and how have you used your Start Up Loan to make a difference in the world?

I was working at Virgin Unite – the independent non-profit foundation for the Virgin Group and Branson Family – when I first started the brand, so it felt like a very natural step. I knew that as well as financial support, Virgin StartUp provided advice through a mentor which was really valuable to me at the time.

Initially we started giving back by donating a percentage of profits to Waves for Water, though more recently I moved to Barbados so our efforts are now focussed towards local initiatives.

If your start-up journey had a theme song, what would it be?

"Beautiful Escape" by Tom Misch. I discovered Tom Misch while I was still employed but had been working on Saint Luke during the evenings and weekends and became obsessed with his music. I had Beautiful Escape on repeat during the early days of Saint Luke as it gave me so much energy and I suppose was the soundtrack to my own escape!

If you could do one thing differently, what would it be?

I try not to have any regrets! It's important to learn how to fail if we are to learn how to succeed. Having said that, I suppose if I could change one thing it would have been to start earlier. I massively underestimated how long it takes to build a brand, it really is a marathon and not a sprint.

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken with your business?

Opening a store in the West Indies! It was a bit of a leap taking Saint Luke from online to brick and mortar but for the business to grow I felt it was important to branch out and diversify and what better place to do that than where the brand was born? I believe business is about taking risks and if you're not being audacious then you're not moving forward.

What advice would you give to someone thinking about starting a business now?

I think Karen Lamb said it best: “A year from now, you will wish you had started today.”

I think I actually first saw this on Richard Branson's blog and it couldn't have resonated more for me. So many people try to over complicate things to create barriers to entry, scaring new players out of the game while inflating their own egos. The moment you realise that it's all crap – it's so freeing and empowering. Anything you really don't know how to do, you can quite easily learn. Or even better, teach yourself a new way and break the mould by doing it better! So: "Screw it, Let's Do It!" as Richard says.

Inspired to launch your own business? Visit Virgin StartUp for Start Up Loans, advice, supporting, mentoring and more.

Where are they now? Titus Learning

Getting B Corp certified: Virgin StartUp founders share their top tips

Founder Friday: Silver start-up boom expected in 2024

What is the best essay writer?

The team EssaysWriting has extensive experience working with highly qualified specialists, so we know who is ideal for the role of the author of essays and scientific papers:

• Easy to communicate. Yes, this point may seem strange to you, but believe me, as a person communicates with people, he manifests himself in the texts. The best essay writer should convey the idea easily and smoothly, without overloading the text or making it messy.
• Extensive work experience. To start making interesting writing, you need to write a lot every day. This practice is used by all popular authors for books, magazines and forum articles. When you read an essay, you immediately understand how long a person has been working in this area.
• Education. The ideal writer should have a philological education or at least take language courses. Spelling and punctuation errors are not allowed in the text, and the meaning should fit the given topic.

Such essay writers work in our team, so you don't have to worry about your order. We make texts of the highest level and apply for the title of leaders in this complex business.

Dr.Jeffrey (PhD)

Finished Papers

• Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

A.I.’s Original Sin

A times investigation found that tech giants altered their own rules to train their newest artificial intelligence systems..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today, a “Times” investigation shows how as the country’s biggest technology companies race to build powerful new artificial intelligence systems, they bent and broke the rules from the start.

My colleague Cade Metz on what he uncovered.

It’s Tuesday, April 16th.

Cade, when we think about all the artificial intelligence products released over the past couple of years, including, of course, these chatbots we’ve talked a lot about on the show, we so frequently talk about their future their future capabilities, their influence on society, jobs, our lives. But you recently decided to go back in time to AI’s past, to its origins to understand the decisions that were made, basically, at the birth of this technology. So why did you decide to do that?

Because if you’re thinking about the future of these chatbots, that is defined by their past. The thing you have to realize is that these chatbots learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data.

So what my colleagues and I wanted to do with our investigation was really focus on that effort to gather more data. We wanted to look at the type of data these companies were collecting, how they were gathering it, and how they were feeding it into their systems.

And when you all undertake this line of reporting, what do you end up finding?

We found that three major players in this race OpenAI, Google, and Meta as they were locked into this competition to develop better and better artificial intelligence, they were willing to do almost anything to get their hands on this data, including ignoring, and in some cases, violating corporate rules and wading into a legal gray area as they gathered this data.

Basically, cutting corners.

Cutting corners left and right.

OK, let’s start with OpenAI, the flashiest player of all.

The most interesting thing we’ve found, is that in late 2021, as OpenAI, the startup in San Francisco that built ChatGPT, as they were pulling together the fundamental technology that would power that chatbot, they ran out of data, essentially.

They had used just about all the respectable English language text on the internet to build this system. And just let that sink in for a bit.

I mean, I’m trying to let that sink in. They basically, like a Pac-Man on a old game, just consumed almost all the English words on the internet, which is kind of unfathomable.

Wikipedia articles by the thousands, news articles, Reddit threads, digital books by the millions. We’re talking about hundreds of billions, even trillions of words.

So by the end of 2021, OpenAI had no more English language texts that they could feed into these systems, but their ambitions are such that they wanted even more.

So here, we should remember that if you’re gathering up all the English language text on the internet, a large portion of that is going to be copyrighted.

So if you’re one of these companies gathering data at that scale, you are absolutely gathering copyrighted data, as well.

Which suggests that, from the very beginning, these companies, a company like OpenAI with ChatGPT, is starting to break, bend the rules.

Yes, they are determined to build this technology thus they are willing to venture into what is a legal gray area.

So given that, what does OpenAI do once it, as you had said, runs out of English language words to mop up and feed into this system?

So they get together, and they say, all right, so what are other options here? And they say, well, what about all the audio and video on the internet? We could transcribe all the audio and video, turn it into text, and feed that into their systems.

Interesting.

So a small team at OpenAI, which included its president and co-founder Greg Brockman, built a speech-recognition technology called Whisper, which could transcribe audio files into text with high accuracy.

And then they gathered up all sorts of audio files, from across the internet, including audio books, podcasts —

— and most importantly, YouTube videos.

Hmm, of which there’s a seemingly endless supply, right? Fair to say maybe tens of millions of videos.

According to my reporting, we’re talking about at least 1,000,000 hours of YouTube videos were scraped off of that video sharing site, fed into this speech recognition system in order to produce new text for training OpenAI’s chatbot. And YouTube’s terms of service do not allow a company like OpenAI to do this. YouTube, which is owned by Google, explicitly says you are not allowed to, in internet parlance, scrape videos en masse from across YouTube and use those videos to build a new application.

That is exactly what OpenAI did. According to my reporting, employees at the company knew that it broke YouTube terms of service, but they resolved to do it anyway.

So, Cade, this makes me want to understand what’s going on over at Google, which as we have talked about in the past on the show, is itself, thinking about and developing its own artificial intelligence model and product.

Well, as OpenAI scrapes up all these YouTube videos and starts to use them to build their chatbot, according to my reporting, some employees at Google, at the very least, are aware that this is happening.

Yes, now when we went to the company about this, a Google spokesman said it did not know that OpenAI was scraping YouTube content and said the company takes legal action over this kind of thing when there’s a clear reason to do so. But according to my reporting, at least some Google employees turned a blind eye to OpenAI’s activities because Google was also using YouTube content to train its AI.

So if they raise a stink about what OpenAI is doing, they end up shining a spotlight on themselves. And they don’t want to do that.

I guess I want to understand what Google’s relationship is to YouTube. Because of course, Google owns YouTube. So what is it allowed or not allowed to do when it comes to feeding YouTube data into Google’s AI models?

It’s an important distinction. Because Google owns YouTube, it defines what can be done with that data. And Google argues that it has a right to that data, that its terms of service allow it to use that data. However, because of that copyright issue, because the copyright to those videos belong to you and I, lawyers who I’ve spoken to say, people could take Google to court and try to determine whether or not those terms of service really allow Google to do this. There’s another legal gray area here where, although Google argues that it’s OK, others may argue it’s not.

Of course, what makes this all so interesting is, you essentially have one tech company Google, keeping another tech company OpenAI’s dirty little secret about basically stealing from YouTube because it doesn’t want people to know that it too is taking from YouTube. And so these companies are essentially enabling each other as they simultaneously seem to be bending or breaking the rules.

What this shows is that there is this belief, and it has been there for years within these companies, among their researchers, that they have a right to this data because they’re on a larger mission to build a technology that they believe will transform the world.

And if you really want to understand this attitude, you can look at our reporting from inside Meta.

And so what does Meta end up doing, according to your reporting?

Well, like Google and other companies, Meta had to scramble to build artificial intelligence that could compete with OpenAI. Mark Zuckerberg is calling engineers and executives at all hours pushing them to acquire this data that is needed to improve the chatbot.

And at one point, my colleagues and I got hold of recordings of these Meta executives and engineers discussing this problem. How they could get their hands on more data where they should try to find it? And they explored all sorts of options.

They talked about licensing books, one by one, at $10 a pop and feeding those into the model.

They even discussed acquiring the book publisher Simon & Schuster and feeding its entire library into their AI model. But ultimately, they decided all that was just too cumbersome, too time consuming, and on the recordings of these meetings, you can hear executives talk about how they were willing to run roughshod over copyright law and ignore the legal concerns and go ahead and scrape the internet and feed this stuff into their models.

They acknowledged that they might be sued over this. But they talked about how OpenAI had done this before them. That they, Meta were just following what they saw as a market precedent.

Interesting, so they go from having conversations like, should we buy a publisher that has tons of copyrighted material suggesting that they’re very conscious of the kind of legal terrain and what’s right and what’s wrong. And instead say, nah, let’s just follow the OpenAI model, that blueprint and just do what we want to do, do what we think we have a right to do, which is to kind of just gobble up all this material across the internet.

It’s a snapshot of that Silicon Valley attitude that we talked about. Because they believe they are building this transformative technology, because they are in this intensely competitive situation where money and power is at stake, they are willing to go there.

But what that means is that there is, at the birth of this technology, a kind of original sin that can’t really be erased.

It can’t be erased, and people are beginning to notice. And they are beginning to sue these companies over it. These companies have to have this copyrighted data to build their systems. It is fundamental to their creation. If a lawsuit bars them from using that copyrighted data, that could bring down this technology.

We’ll be right back.

So Cade, walk us through these lawsuits that are being filed against these AI companies based on the decisions they made early on to use technology as they did and the chances that it could result in these companies not being able to get the data they so desperately say they need.

These suits are coming from a wide range of places. They’re coming from computer programmers who are concerned that their computer programs have been fed into these systems. They’re coming from book authors who have seen their books being used. They’re coming from publishing companies. They’re coming from news corporations like, “The New York Times,” incidentally, which has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

News organizations that are concerned over their news articles being used to build these systems.

And here, I think it’s important to say as a matter of transparency, Cade, that your reporting is separate from that lawsuit. That lawsuit was filed by the business side of “The New York Times” by people who are not involved in your reporting or in this “Daily” episode, just to get that out of the way.

I’m assuming that you have spoken to many lawyers about this, and I wonder if there’s some insight that you can shed on the basic legal terrain? I mean, do the companies seem to have a strong case that they have a right to this information, or do companies like the “Times,” who are suing them, seem to have a pretty strong case that, no, that decision violates their copyrighted materials.

Like so many legal questions, this is incredibly complicated. It comes down to what’s called fair use, which is a part of copyright law that determines whether companies can use copyrighted data to build new things. And there are many factors that go into this. There are good arguments on the OpenAI side. There are good arguments on “The New York Times” side.

Copyright law says that can’t take my work and reproduce it and sell it to someone. That’s not allowed. But what’s called fair use does allow companies and individuals to use copyrighted works in part. They can take snippets of it. They can take the copyrighted works and transform it into something new. That is what OpenAI and others are arguing they’re doing.

But there are other things to consider. Does that transformative work compete with the individuals and companies that supplied the data that owned the copyrights?

And here, the suit between “The New York Times” company and OpenAI is illustrative. If “The New York Times” creates articles that are then used to build a chatbot, does that chatbot end up competing with “The New York Times?” Do people end up going to that chatbot for their information, rather than going to the “Times” website and actually reading the article? That is one of the questions that will end up deciding this case and cases like it.

So what would it mean for these AI companies for some, or even all of these lawsuits to succeed?

Well, if these tech companies are required to license the copyrighted data that goes into their systems, if they’re required to pay for it, that becomes a problem for these companies. We’re talking about digital data the size of the entire internet.

Licensing all that copyrighted data is not necessarily feasible. We quote the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in our story where one of their lawyers says that it does not work for these companies to license that data. It’s too expensive. It’s on too large a scale.

Hmm, it would essentially make this technology economically impractical.

Exactly, so a jury or a judge or a law ruling against OpenAI, could fundamentally change the way this technology is built. The extreme case is these companies are no longer allowed to use copyrighted material in building these chatbots. And that means they have to start from scratch. They have to rebuild everything they’ve built. So this is something that, not only imperils what they have today, it imperils what they want to build in the future.

And conversely, what happens if the courts rule in favor of these companies and say, you know what, this is fair use. You were fine to have scraped this material and to keep borrowing this material into the future free of charge?

Well, one significant roadblock drops for these companies. And they can continue to gather up all that extra data, including images and sounds and videos and build increasingly powerful systems. But the thing is, even if they can access as much copyrighted material as they want, these companies may still run into a problem.

Pretty soon they’re going to run out of digital data on the internet.

That human-created data they rely on is going to dry up. They’re using up this data faster than humans create it. One research organization estimates that by 2026, these companies will run out of viable data on the internet.

Wow. Well, in that case, what would these tech companies do? I mean, where are they going to go if they’ve already scraped YouTube, if they’ve already scraped podcasts, if they’ve already gobbled up the internet and that altogether is not sufficient?

What many people inside these companies will tell you, including Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, they’ll tell you that what they will turn to is what’s called synthetic data.

And what is that?

That Is data generated by an AI model that is then used to build a better AI model. It’s AI helping to build better AI. That is the vision, ultimately, they have for the future that they won’t need all this human generated text. They’ll just have the AI build the text that will feed future versions of AI.

So they will feed the AI systems the material that the AI systems themselves create. But is that really a workable solid plan? Is that considered high-quality data? Is that good enough?

If you do this on a large scale, you quickly run into problems. As we all know, as we’ve discussed on this podcast, these systems make mistakes. They hallucinate . They make stuff up. They show biases that they’ve learned from internet data. And if you start using the data generated by the AI to build new AI, those mistakes start to reinforce themselves.

The systems start to get trapped in these cul-de-sacs where they end up not getting better but getting worse.

What you’re really saying is, these AI machines need the unique perfection of the human creative mind.

Well, as it stands today, that is absolutely the case. But these companies have grand visions for where this will go. And they feel, and they’re already starting to experiment with this, that if you have an AI system that is sufficiently powerful, if you make a copy of it, if you have two of these AI models, one can produce new data, and the other one can judge that data.

It can curate that data as a human would. It can provide the human judgment, So. To speak. So as one model produces the data, the other one can judge it, discard the bad data, and keep the good data. And that’s how they ultimately see these systems creating viable synthetic data. But that has not happened yet, and it’s unclear whether it will work.

It feels like the real lesson of your investigation is that if you have to allegedly steal data to feed your AI model and make it economically feasible, then maybe you have a pretty broken model. And that if you need to create fake data, as a result, which as you just said, kind of undermines AI’s goal of mimicking human thinking and language, then maybe you really have a broken model.

And so that makes me wonder if the folks you talk to, the companies that we’re focused on here, ever ask themselves the question, could we do this differently? Could we create an AI model that just needs a lot less data?

They have thought about other models for decades. The thing to realize here, is that is much easier said than done. We’re talking about creating systems that can mimic the human brain. That is an incredibly ambitious task. And after struggling with that for decades, these companies have finally stumbled on something that they feel works that is a path to that incredibly ambitious goal.

And they’re going to continue to push in that direction. Yes, they’re exploring other options, but those other options aren’t working.

What works is more data and more data and more data. And because they see a path there, they’re going to continue down that path. And if there are roadblocks there, and they think they can knock them down, they’re going to knock them down.

But what if the tech companies never get enough or make enough data to get where they think they want to go, even as they’re knocking down walls along the way? That does seem like a real possibility.

If these companies can’t get their hands on more data, then these technologies, as they’re built today, stop improving.

We will see their limitations. We will see how difficult it really is to build a system that can match, let alone surpass the human brain.

These companies will be forced to look for other options, technically. And we will see the limitations of these grandiose visions that they have for the future of artificial intelligence.

OK, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Glad to be here.

Here’s what else you need to know today. Israeli leaders spent Monday debating whether and how to retaliate against Iran’s missile and drone attack over the weekend. Herzi Halevi, Israel’s Military Chief of Staff, declared that the attack will be responded to.

In Washington, a spokesman for the US State Department, Matthew Miller reiterated American calls for restraint —

^MATTHEW MILLER^ Of course, we continue to make clear to everyone that we talked to that we want to see de-escalation that we don’t want to see a wider regional war. That’s something that’s been —

— but emphasized that a final call about retaliation was up to Israel. ^MATTHEW MILLER^ Israel is a sovereign country. They have to make their own decisions about how best to defend themselves. What we always try to do —

And the first criminal trial of a former US President officially got underway on Monday in a Manhattan courtroom. Donald Trump, on trial for allegedly falsifying documents to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn star, watched as jury selection began.

The initial pool of 96 jurors quickly dwindled. More than half of them were dismissed after indicating that they did not believe that they could be impartial. The day ended without a single juror being chosen.

Today’s episode was produced by Stella Tan, Michael Simon Johnson, Muge Zaidi, and Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Marc Georges and Liz O. Baylen, contains original music by Diane Wong, Dan Powell, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

• April 17, 2024   •   24:52 Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
• April 16, 2024   •   29:29 A.I.’s Original Sin
• April 15, 2024   •   24:07 Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
• April 14, 2024   •   46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
• April 12, 2024   •   34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam
• April 11, 2024   •   28:39 The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics
• April 10, 2024   •   22:49 Trump’s Abortion Dilemma
• April 9, 2024   •   30:48 How Tesla Planted the Seeds for Its Own Potential Downfall
• April 8, 2024   •   30:28 The Eclipse Chaser
• April 7, 2024 The Sunday Read: ‘What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living’
• April 5, 2024   •   29:11 An Engineering Experiment to Cool the Earth
• April 4, 2024   •   32:37 Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Cade Metz

Produced by Stella Tan ,  Michael Simon Johnson ,  Mooj Zadie and Rikki Novetsky

Edited by Marc Georges and Liz O. Baylen

Original music by Diane Wong ,  Dan Powell and Pat McCusker

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

A Times investigation shows how the country’s biggest technology companies, as they raced to build powerful new artificial intelligence systems, bent and broke the rules from the start.

Cade Metz, a technology reporter for The Times, explains what he uncovered.

On today’s episode

Cade Metz , a technology reporter for The New York Times.

Background reading

How tech giants cut corners to harvest data for A.I.

What to know about tech companies using A.I. to teach their own A.I.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz

Advertisement