By Rajwa Quasim
When AI companies collect data through buying and scrapping datasets, Verb has come up with an initiative where individuals could sell their data while monetizing it. The company first shared exclusively with Axios.
Verb is launching a marketplace on Thursday for ordinary consumers to sell data directly to the companies and AI labs of their choice. It aims to give a share of a market which was traditionally benefited by tech firms and data brokers.
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Verb is the place that people “will go to monetize something that for decades we’ve given away for free,” said Cyrus Beschloss, Verb’s CEO and co-founder. It lets the users choose to share selected information, including shopping habits, app usage and social media activity, or even who can use the data. The users can select specific categories of information that can be shared and rest toggle off. Beschloss believes that this system could create “a complete new asset class.” The company had previously made attempts to monetize customers directly for the data, but it did not gain much attention then. He said, “AI labs are expected to be the biggest buyers because they require vast amounts of data to be able to train upcoming models.”
It works by users installing the Verb tracker on their phone. Users can set their own price, but Verb will provide an estimate according to number of categories users want to share. This comes in the backdrop when AI companies are spending. billions collecting data from various entities. Therefore, Verb will help consumers become the sellers instead of being only the product.
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However, the idea also raises privacy concerns. Digital advocates warn that consumers may not fully understand how their personal information could be used once it’s licensed for AI development. But Verb believes that this initiative would help users know their digital footprint. ‘”If we can’t tell users that their data is safe, then we are not a company… and we don’t deserve to be if we can’t do that,” Beschloss said.
Like Verb, Mercor helps AI companies hire people to generate training data or evaluate model output based on their expertise. MIT spinout Vana has users pool their data collectively and vote on which companies get access.