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Business Insider
8 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Here's the list of websites gig workers used to fine-tune Anthropic's AI models. Its contractor left it wide open.
An internal spreadsheet obtained by Business Insider shows which websites Surge AI gig workers were told to mine — and which to avoid — while fine-tuning Anthropic's AI to make it sound more "helpful, honest, and harmless." The spreadsheet allows sources like Bloomberg, Harvard University, and the New England Journal of Medicine while blacklisting others like The New York Times and Reddit. Anthropic says it wasn't aware of the spreadsheet and said it was created by a third-party vendor, the data-labeling startup Surge AI, which declined to comment on this point. "This document was created by a third-party vendor without our involvement," an Anthropic spokesperson said. "We were unaware of its existence until today and cannot validate the contents of the specific document since we had no role in its creation." Frontier AI companies mine the internet for content and often work with startups with thousands of human contractors, like Surge, to refine their AI models. In this case, project documents show Surge worked to make Anthropic's AI sound more human, avoid "offensive" statements, and cite documents more accurately. Many of the whitelisted sources copyright or otherwise restrict their content. The Mayo Clinic, Cornell University, and Morningstar, whose main websites were all listed as "sites you can use," told BI they don't have any agreements with Anthropic to use this data for training AI models. Surge left a trove of materials detailing its work for Anthropic, including the spreadsheet, accessible to anyone with the link on Google Drive. Surge locked down the documents shortly after BI reached out for comment. "We take data security seriously, and documents are restricted by project and access level where possible," a Surge spokesperson said. "We are looking closely into the matter to ensure all materials are protected." It's the latest incident in which a data-labeling startup used public Google Docs to pass around sensitive AI training instructions. Surge's competitor, Scale AI, also exposed internal data in this manner, locking the documents down after BI revealed the issue. A Google Cloud spokesperson told BI that its default setting restricts a company's files from sharing outside the organization; changing this setting is a "choice that a customer explicitly makes," the spokesperson said. Surge hit $1 billion in revenue last year and is raising funds at a $15 billion valuation, Reuters reported. Anthropic was most recently valued at $61.5 billion, and its Claude chatbot is widely considered a leading competitor to ChatGPT. What's allowed — and what's not Google Sheet data showed the spreadsheet was created in November 2024, and it's referenced in updates as recent as May 2025 in other documents left public by Surge. The list functions as a "guide" for what online sources Surge's gig workers can and can't use on the Anthropic project. The list includes over 120 permitted websites from a wide range of fields, including academia, healthcare, law, and finance. It includes 10 US universities, including Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago. It also lists popular business news sources, such as Bloomberg, PitchBook, Crunchbase, Seeking Alpha, and PR Newswire. Medical information sources, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, and government sources, such as a list of UN treaties and the US National Archives, are also in the whitelist. So are university publishers like Cambridge University Press. Here's the full list of who's allowed, which says that it is "not exhaustive." And here's the list of who is banned — or over 50 "common sources" that are "now disallowed," as the spreadsheet puts it. The blacklist mostly consists of media outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others. It also includes other types of sources like Reddit, Stanford University, the academic publisher Wiley, and the Harvard Business Review. The spreadsheet doesn't explain why some sources are permitted and others are not. The blacklist could reflect websites that made direct demands to AI companies to stop using their content, said Edward Lee, a law professor at Santa Clara University. That can happen through written requests or through an automated method like Some sources in the blacklist have taken legal stances against AI companies using their content. Reddit, for example, sued Anthropic this year, saying the AI company accessed its site without permission. Anthropic has denied these claims. The New York Times sued OpenAI, and The Wall Street Journal's parent, Dow Jones, sued Perplexity, for similar reasons. "The Times has objected to Anthropic's unlicensed use of Times content for AI purposes and has taken steps to block their access as part of our ongoing IP protection and enforcement efforts," the Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told BI. "As the law and our terms of service make clear, scraping or using the Times's content is prohibited without our prior written permission, such as a licensing agreement." Surge workers used the list for RLHF Surge contractors were told to use the list for a later, but crucial, stage of AI model training in which humans rate an existing chatbot's responses to improve them. That process is called "reinforcement learning from human feedback," or RLHF. The Surge contractors working for Anthropic did tasks like copying and pasting text from the internet, asking the AI to summarize it, and choosing the best summary. In another case, workers were asked to "find at least 5-10 PDFs" from the web and quiz Anthropic's AI about the documents' content to improve its citation skills. That doesn't involve feeding web data directly into the model for it to regurgitate later — the better-known process that's known as pre-training. Courts haven't addressed whether there's a clear distinction between the two processes when it comes to copyright law. There's a good chance both would be viewed as crucial to building a state-of-the-art AI model, Lee, the law professor, said. It is "probably not going to make a material difference in terms of fair use," Lee said.
Indian Express
5 days ago
- Business
- Indian Express
Gurgaon couple with Rs 60 LPA combined income splits every bill equally; Delhi matchmaking startup founder questions the logic
A Delhi-NCR based entrepreneur has stirred up debate online after questioning why a high-earning married couple continues to split all their bills down the middle. Ayushmaan Kapoor, founder of The Date Crew, recently shared a personal reflection on LinkedIn after learning about a Gurgaon-based couple, both professionals with annual incomes of over Rs 30 lakh, who reportedly divide every shared cost, from groceries to electricity bills, using Splitwise or Google Sheets. 'They make Rs 30L+ each. But still maintaining a Splitwise or Google Sheet to divide every single expense: rent, groceries, fuel, Swiggy, electricity,' Kapoor wrote, adding, 'Each person 'pays their share,' like flatmates.' For Kapoor, this level of meticulousness signaled something deeper than just budgeting. 'It's baffling to me,' he said, before explaining why he believes such financial habits point to a lack of alignment in the relationship. Drawing an analogy between marriage and running a startup, Kapoor said, 'When you marry someone, you're essentially co-founding a company. And that company… is your life together.' He argued that like any successful business, a marriage needs four key ingredients: a shared vision for the future, clear roles and responsibilities, a joint financial plan with pooled resources, and regular check-ins to ensure both partners stay on track. The crux of his message: couples should operate from a shared financial philosophy, not a spreadsheet of 50-50 transactions. However, not everyone saw things his way. Many commenters pushed back, defending the couple's approach as modern, transparent, and respectful of individual autonomy. 'Agreed, but don't you think having a system like Splitwise or sheets in place only adds more clarity and transparency?' one person commented on Kapoor's post. 'Let's be honest, it gets tough to have money discussions in general. Wouldn't this solve the problem entirely?' Others felt Kapoor's analogy between startups and relationships was oversimplified. One user wrote, 'Scary that someone running a matchmaking firm has such a shallow view of how relationships work. Recording expenses has nothing to do with having different goals and priorities… Even if you did pool your capital, recording what was spent is just financial prudence.' Another LinkedIN user responded saying, 'Tracking shared expenses doesn't mean you're not working towards common goals. It just means you're also respecting personal space and freedom. Everyone needs their own financial breathing room, even in a partnership. A couple can have both, a shared pool and their own individual funds. That's not division. That's balance.'
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
That free lunch your boss is offering might just be a way to get you back into the office
AI customer service platform Sendbird caters a Friday lunch for employees who come into the office. The free lunch is popular and has encouraged more workers to return to the office. Sendbird's chief of staff told BI she hopes to see people "organically" come in five days a week. On Fridays, employees at Sendbird's headquarters are treated to a free lunch — one of the perks of showing up in person. Yeji Yoon, the company's chief of staff, told Business Insider that the company's chief financial officer started the office tradition for "selfish" reasons: He loves bahn mi sandwiches, particularly those from a local Vietnamese spot. Fridays aren't official in-person days. Since early 2024, the company has required those who can come into its San Mateo headquarters to be on-site Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It's also rolling out return-to-office mandates at its other offices around the world. But then a few of the company's teams, including the finance team, decided to come on Fridays, too, because it was easier to collaborate. "Our CFO would start going around asking anyone else in the office, do you want a sandwich?" Yoon said. "It just became this regular thing, so it grew extremely organically." Now, there's a Slack channel dedicated to Friday office lunch. Bahn mi orders are entered onto a Google Sheet, and everyone who participates has to submit their orders by 11 a.m. For "fun," one of the company's performance marketing managers started looking at the data: total orders over time, the most popular customization — no peppers, more cilantro — and how orders vary depending on the number of people on vacation. The conclusion is that "food is definitely a way to keep people or bring people in the office," Yoon said. While academics, sociologists, and working parents have all lauded the benefits of remote work, Yoon said it's just not practical anymore, especially with the new changes in AI. Remote roles are best when "there's no real dependency on collaboration or iterations or real-time decision-making that needs to happen," she said. "Now, especially with AI, where everything is changing so quickly, product is changing so quickly, customers' expectations are changing really quickly — nobody really knows how fast everything is changing. They don't really understand it. There's a lot of collaboration that has to happen on the go." The pace of work and the company's product releases slow down when workers are remote, she said. And while there are no plans to force employees to come into the office on Fridays, the free bahm mi might be all they need to make it happen. Read the original article on Business Insider Solve the daily Crossword
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
That free lunch your boss is offering might just be a way to get you back into the office
On Fridays, employees at Sendbird's headquarters are treated to a free lunch — one of the perks of showing up in person. Yeji Yoon, the company's chief of staff, told Business Insider that the company's chief financial officer started the office tradition for "selfish" reasons: He loves bahn mi sandwiches, particularly those from a local Vietnamese spot. Fridays aren't official in-person days. Since early 2024, the company has required those who can come into its San Mateo headquarters to be on-site Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It's also rolling out return-to-office mandates at its other offices around the world. But then a few of the company's teams, including the finance team, decided to come on Fridays, too, because it was easier to collaborate. "Our CFO would start going around asking anyone else in the office, do you want a sandwich?" Yoon said. "It just became this regular thing, so it grew extremely organically." Now, there's a Slack channel dedicated to Friday office lunch. Bahn mi orders are entered onto a Google Sheet, and everyone who participates has to submit their orders by 11 a.m. For "fun," one of the company's performance marketing managers started looking at the data: total orders over time, the most popular customization — no peppers, more cilantro — and how orders vary depending on the number of people on vacation. The conclusion is that "food is definitely a way to keep people or bring people in the office," Yoon said. While academics, sociologists, and working parents have all lauded the benefits of remote work, Yoon said it's just not practical anymore, especially with the new changes in AI. Remote roles are best when "there's no real dependency on collaboration or iterations or real-time decision-making that needs to happen," she said. "Now, especially with AI, where everything is changing so quickly, product is changing so quickly, customers' expectations are changing really quickly — nobody really knows how fast everything is changing. They don't really understand it. There's a lot of collaboration that has to happen on the go." The pace of work and the company's product releases slow down when workers are remote, she said. And while there are no plans to force employees to come into the office on Fridays, the free bahm mi might be all they need to make it happen.
Time of India
5 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
CA says you don't need Rs 50 lakh in bank to invest like the rich, suggests a 3 small steps to start with
Think investing is only for the rich? Think again. Chartered Accountant Nitin Kaushik has gone viral on X after dropping a brutally simple truth bomb: you don't need Rs 50 lakh in your bank account to start investing like a millionaire—you just need three smart habits. His post is now resonating with thousands who've realised that building wealth isn't about working harder, but working smarter with your money. Here's his three-step game plan that even beginners (and the broke) can adopt: Explore courses from Top Institutes in Select a Course Category Design Thinking Data Science Others Public Policy Product Management Operations Management Digital Marketing Degree Artificial Intelligence Leadership healthcare PGDM Technology Healthcare MBA CXO Management Finance Data Science Project Management Skills you'll gain: Duration: 25 Weeks IIM Kozhikode CERT-IIMK PCP DTIM Async India Starts on undefined Get Details Skills you'll gain: Duration: 22 Weeks IIM Indore CERT-IIMI DTAI Async India Starts on undefined Get Details 1. Why are you investing? Kaushik says the wealthy don't invest randomly—they always have a goal. Whether it's short-term goals like building an emergency fund, buying a new iPhone, or planning a solo trip, or long-term ones like early retirement, a child's education, or a dream house—every investment has a 'why' behind it. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Play War Thunder now for free War Thunder Play Now Undo The advice? Write down your goals and stick them on your fridge. That daily visual reminder keeps you focused and motivated. — Finance_Bareek (@Finance_Bareek) 2. Always budget Budgeting isn't about killing joy—it's about buying freedom. Kaushik suggests tracking every rupee coming in and going out using a Google Sheet or finance app. Once you've taken care of essentials like rent, bills, and groceries, the next step is to save—and most importantly—invest 10–20% of your monthly income. Even starting with Rs 5,000 a month can grow into over Rs 46 lakh in 20 years (assuming 12% returns). His simple hack? Cancel just one unnecessary expense—like that second Zomato order—and channel it into your SIP instead. 3. Automate investing What sets wealthy investors apart? Systems—not willpower. Kaushik recommends setting up a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) with a fixed amount and date, so it auto-deducts from your account each month. Once it's set, forget it. The key is to avoid panic-selling when markets dip and to review your plan every 6 to 12 months, increasing the SIP as your income grows. Automation ensures consistency, even when motivation wanes. Why does it matter? Most people believe investing is something you do after you get rich. Kaushik flips that logic: investing is how you get there. The takeaway? Start small, stay consistent, and let compounding work its magic.
