Trying to spin this into a plausible story: OpenAI trains Jukebox-2, and finds that, though it struggles with lyrics, it can produce instrumental pieces in certain genres that people enjoy about as much as human-produced music, for about $100 a track. Pandora notices that it would only need to play each track ($100 / ($0.00133 per play) = 75k) times to break even with the royalties it wouldn’t have to pay. Pandora leases the model from OpenAI, throws $100k at this experiment to produce 1k tracks in popular genres, plays each track 100k times, gets ~1M thumbs-[up/down]s (plus ~100M “no rating” reactions, for whatever those are worth), and fine-tunes the model using that reward signal to produce a new crop of tracks people will like slightly more.
Hmm. I’m not sure if this would work: sure, from one point of view, Pandora gets ~1M data points for free (on net), but from another reasonable point of view, each data point (a track) costs $100 -- definitely not cheaper than getting 100 ratings off Mechanical Turk, which is probably about as good a signal. This cycle might only work for less-expensive-to-synthesize art forms.
Trying to spin this into a plausible story: OpenAI trains Jukebox-2, and finds that, though it struggles with lyrics, it can produce instrumental pieces in certain genres that people enjoy about as much as human-produced music, for about $100 a track. Pandora notices that it would only need to play each track ($100 / ($0.00133 per play) = 75k) times to break even with the royalties it wouldn’t have to pay. Pandora leases the model from OpenAI, throws $100k at this experiment to produce 1k tracks in popular genres, plays each track 100k times, gets ~1M thumbs-[up/down]s (plus ~100M “no rating” reactions, for whatever those are worth), and fine-tunes the model using that reward signal to produce a new crop of tracks people will like slightly more.
Hmm. I’m not sure if this would work: sure, from one point of view, Pandora gets ~1M data points for free (on net), but from another reasonable point of view, each data point (a track) costs $100 -- definitely not cheaper than getting 100 ratings off Mechanical Turk, which is probably about as good a signal. This cycle might only work for less-expensive-to-synthesize art forms.