[Avipat_]

We launched Kled 6 weeks ago as a data marketplace for everyday people. Users upload personal content like camera rolls, dashcam footage, homework, POV recordings, and original music, and we pay them for it.

While AI companies scrape public data to train their models, we’re building a platform that compensates users and gives AI labs access to licensed, high-quality data.

The product took off quickly. We did over 20 million impressions on Twitter, more than 10,000 people signed up, petabytes of data were uploaded, and we’ve paid out over $300,000 to users.

Every file uploaded is automatically classified and made searchable so AI companies can instantly license the exact datasets they need.

Over the next five weeks, we’re doubling down on our labeling operations and hiring top AI engineers. We’ve raised over $2 million in venture capital at a $40 million valuation. High pay and high equity. Email [e-mail]

[lampiaio]

No one cares about the aggregated sum you spent, and something tells me that instead of directly saying how much the average user was paid, the PR team chose to divulge the total amount because it sounds better (someone must have pat themselves on the back when they phrased it as "we paid users $300K").

[Avipat_]

the money came directly from AI Labs paying for it. not venture or anything else.

[minimaxir]

Why did you omit that it's a cryptocurrency? https://x.com/useKled/status/1932778949051838827

[pogue]

Oh man, sounded promising until discovering it was a rug pull.

I wonder if user data does have some value. I could see long haul dashcam footage possibility being worth something if you were training self driving cars...

[codingdave]

Job postings go here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757794

[amelius]

Wait a minute, if users upload their camera rolls, doesn't that mean that in most cases these also contain footage of __other__ people?

Sorry, but wtf?!?

[Avipat_]

Correct but the person who took the pic/vid owns the rights for it legally speaking. This content is already being trained off of, scraped off YouTube, Instagram etc. All Kled does is put the money back into the pockets of the people.

[Forgeties79]

I’m also curious about this. I’m not having a strong reaction yet because I’m just not quite sure what to make of it, though at first glance it certainly has me going “wait what?”

I hope it’s not just some boiler plate legalese about how you have to make sure you have the rights to everything you upload.

[gyanchawdhary]

Wow, you’ve cracked the mystery of photography .. sometimes people take pictures of other people. What’s next, discovering that mirrors reflect more than just yourself and that’s a valid wtf moment in your world view too …