MIT Technology Review's latest edition of The Download highlights a surprising new market: AI labs buying data from failed startups. When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup, he didn't think its data was worth much. He has since turned the company's digital archives into tens of thousands of dollars by selling its codebase and workspace data.
The trade is part of a growing market in which companies that help shut down startups sell their data to AI labs. Demand has grown as training labs hit the limits of public and synthetic datasets, with buyers seeking real-world records to help train AI agents. The sales, however, raise legal and ethical questions that the industry has yet to settle.
The newsletter also features its "Are we there yet?" series, which examines whether interspecies communication is within reach. A growing arsenal of devices and advances in AI have made it easier to study animal howls, squeaks, and clicks, and decoding how animals communicate could reveal the inner lives of other species. Making sense of it all, however, remains complex.
Elsewhere, hackers disrupted the US Federal Election Commission's website a week before the midterms, and the FEC filing system went offline. Restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine have prompted US allies to rethink their dependence on the service, while greenhouse gas levels continued to reach new records worldwide.
Source: MIT Technology Review · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing