#the-verge
OpenAI Building a Social Network #
Further proving the content-based monetization approach I discussed in the previous post is OpenAI, who is said to be working on its own social network as a competitor to X. OpenAI is obviously solely in the LLMs game and doesn’t have an advertising division to fully take advantage of the aggregate views harnessed by a social media network, making it apparent that they’re instead going to use the network to gather human-written content for use in training. Since Meta and xAI—two large players in foundation models—control enormous social media networks (Google, alas, gave up this advantage with the shutting down of Google+), this new network is likely going to be used by OpenAI to balance out the short-form content that it lacks through other sources like Reddit.
# 2025-04-17 - #ai, #openai, #the-vergexAI Acquires X #
Aside from the obvious lunacy of having a social media platform that’s able to be sold through a single person’s decision, this acquisition further shows monetization through directly selling user-created content to AI companies. A major example of this is with Reddit, who pivoted to utilizing user posts in AI applications, rather than relying solely on advertisements to generate revenue. Both X and Reddit have shared many similarities when it comes to the protection of data, most notably heavily increasing monetization of their respective APIs. While this primarily created community outrage due to third-party clients being unable to pay the exorbitant prices, API monetization was mostly a response to the new invaluable state of data being formed by the training of LLMs. Since the APIs previously provided the sole authorized way to access platform data, by monetizing it, both X and Reddit effectively put a price on their user data and increased their control of it. As a result, in the same way that Google and OpenAI have deals with Reddit to access a valuable human-written corpus, xAI is now able to use a vast library of X posts exclusive to itself.
# 2025-03-28 - #the-verge