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AI development is moving at a rapid pace, but it risks running headlong into a wall. As websites increasingly place barriers on scraping (some of which are allegedly ignored), and as the remaining content is voraciously collected by scrapers to train AI models, concerns are growing that we may run out of usable training data. The industrys answer? Synthetic data. Recently in the industry, synthetic data has been talked about a lot, said Sebastien Bubeck, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, in the companys livestreamed release of GPT-5 last week. Bubeck stressed its importance for the future of AI modelsan idea echoed by his boss, Sam Altman, who live-tweeted the event, saying he was excited for much more to come. The prospect of relying heavily on synthetic data hasnt gone unnoticed by the creative industries. I believe the main reason companies like OpenAI are having to rely more on synthetic data now is that they’ve run out of high-quality human created data to mine from the public facing internet, says Reid Southern, a film concept artist and illustrator. Southern believes theres another motive. It further distances them from any copyrighted materials they’ve trained on that could land them in hot water. For this reason, he has publicly called the practice data laundering. He argues that AI companies could train their models on copyrighted works, generate AI variations, then remove the originals from their datasets. They could then claim their training set is ‘ethical’ because it didn’t technically train on the original image by their logic, says Southern. That’s why we call it data laundering, because in a sense, they’re attempting to clean the data and strip it of its copyright. We create synthetic data to advance AI, in line with relevant copyright laws,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Fast Company in a statement. “Generating high-quality synthetic data means we can build more intelligent and capable products like ChatGPT that help millions work more efficiently, discover new ways to learn and create, and enable countries to innovate and compete globally. The issue is more nuanced, according to Felix Simon, an AI researcher at the University of Oxford. In one sense, it doesnt really remediate the original harm over which creators and AI firms squabble, he says. After all, synthetic data isnt plucked from the ether but presumably created with models that have reportedly been trained with data from creators and copyright holdersoften without their permission and without compensation. From the perspective of societal justice, rights, and duties, these rights holders still are owed something even with the use of synthetic databe that compensation, acknowledgements, or both. Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Traineda non-profit certifying AI companies that respect creators intellectual property rightsshares Southerns concerns. I think synthetic data is a legitimately helpful way to augment your dataset, he says. If youre training an AI model, its a way of increasing the coverage of your training data. And at a time when were butting up against the limits of legitimately accessible training data, its seen as a way to extend the usable life of that data. Still, Newton-Rex acknowledges its darker side. At the same time, I think unfortunately its effect is, at least in part, one of copyright laundering, he says. I think both are true. He warns against taking AI firms promises at face value. Synthetic data is not a panacea from the incredibly important copyright questions, he says. I think there tends to be so much of a feeling that synthetic data helps you, as an AI developer, get around copyright concerns. That belief, he says, is wrong. The framing of synthetic dataand the way AI companies talk about model trainingalso helps them distance themselves from the individuals whose work they may be using. The average listener, if they hear this model was trained on synthetic data, theyre bound to think, Oh, right, okay. Well, this probably isnt Ed Sheerans latest album, right? It further moves us away from an easy understanding of how these models are actually made, which is ultimately by exploiting peoples lifes work. He compares it to plastic recycling, where a recycled container might once have been a toy, a car bumper, or something else entirely. The fact these AI models mash all this stuff up and generate, quote-unquote, new output, does nothing to reduce their reliance on the original work. For Newton-Rex, this is the critical takeaway: Really the absolutely critical element here, and it’s just got to be remembered, is that even in a world of synthetic data, whats happening is peoples work is being exploited in order to compete with them.
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E-Commerce
Blue Apron is breaking free of subscriptions. The meal kit delivery service, known for its boxes that include a recipe and all the ingredients customers need to cook a meal themselves, has relaunched this week with a refreshed logo and new mascot alongside a new, reimagined business model that now lets consumers make purchases a la carte. [Photo: Blue Apron] The brand’s old subscription-based membership is now optional, and while those who like it can keep it or sign up for their own meal-kit subscriptions, customers now also have the option to order meal kits for one-off deliveries. There’s also new “Dish by Blue Apron” line of pre-made meals, and an “Assemble & Bake,” line of one-pan meals that Blue Apron says take five minutes of prep time or less. Both extend the brand into new product categories. “As we thought about our legacy Blue Apron offering, we felt that it was a bit too inflexible for what our customers were needing, and also not offering quite enough convenience,” Whitney Pegden, Blue Apron’s senior vice president and general manager tells Fast Company. [Photo: Blue Apron] Blue Apron rebrand plates up a new purpose Much of the brand’s original value proposition when it launched in 2012 was that it “could help you learn how to cook, and teach you new skills, and expose you to new, cool ingredients,” Pegden says. “Recently we’re finding that more and more, customers just need help.” The new Blue Apron is meant to be a “shortcut,” to help get dinner on the table. After seeing its net revenue fall by nearly half in the late 2010s, Blue Apron was bought by the Walmart-owned Wonder Group for $103 million in 2023. It’s now one in a portfolio of brands that make up Wonder’s food delivery super app alongside Tastemade and Grubhub. The idea is households don’t want to eat the same thing every night, but no matter what they’re looking for, Wonder will have it. Blue Apron’s relaunch and new product lines show that under new ownership, the brand is outgrowing its meal-kit-subscription-only model to meet more needs. [Photo: Blue Apron] Meet Sous The brand’s new mascot the Blue Apron Sous, as in sous-chef, is an illustrated chef that shows up as a man, woman, or child wearing a blue apron. Sous is meant to convey that the brand is “with you in the kitchen, helping you out, almost like you’re sous-chef to get the meal on the table,” Pegden says. For Blue Apron, being a helper no longer necessarily means having customers cook all on their ownor relying on recurring customer payments. The hope is that the less restrictive model will lead to more sales. “One of the big bets we are making with this relaunch is that by not locking people into a subscription and requiring them to get a box every week,” Pegden says of the Blue Apron rebrand and repositioning. “If we can give you all the freedom you want to shop when you want, how you want, then actually people will continue to use us more and we’ll attract a broader audience.”
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E-Commerce
Last year, Cody Finke got game-changing news from the Department of Energy (DOE): his climate tech startup was in line for a $189 million grant to help build its first commercial-scale plant. The company, Brimstone, has developed a new way to make cementone of the biggest sources of carbon emissions on the planet. The startup also makes smelter-grade alumina, a critical mineral that the U.S. currently imports. The team spent months going through the DOEs grueling evaluation process, from a 200-page application to a three-hour-long interview in front of a panel of 30 technical experts. After the DOE moved the project forward, months of negotiations followed. The grant was finalized in January, just before the inauguration. Then came the Trump administration. This summer, the DOE announced that it was pulling the funding, along with grants for more than 20 other projects working on industrial decarbonization and carbon capture. Brimstone is appealing the decision, since producing critical minerals in the U.S. is a priority for Trump. But the company is also moving forward with its plans to build its plant regardless of what happens with the government funding. Our belief has been from the beginning that our technology has to work without subsidies, Finke says. And if it doesnt work without subsidies, then it probably isnt going to have the impact we want. [Photo: Brimstone] Tech built for the bottom linenot just carbon cuts Brimstones technology tackles an industry thats notoriously hard to decarbonize. Cement production is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions, or three times as much as the airline industry. Thats not just because of the energy it takes to make cement, but because of chemistry: Typical Portland cement is made by heating up limestone, and that process releases CO2 from the rocks. The startup uses silicate rocks instead, such as basalt, which dont release CO2. If the new process runs on renewable energy, the result is zero-carbon cement. If it uses the mix of energy on the grid, the emissions reduction could still be as much as 75%. If it can be widely scaled up in the industrywhich produces more than 4 billion tons of cement each year for everything from roads and bridges to homesit could make a significant dent in global emissions. From the beginning, when Finke first started developing the idea with his cofounder as a grad student at Caltech in 2019, he calculated what could make it economically viable. The new process had a fundamental advantageinstead of making CO2 as a byproduct, it makes valuable materials that can be sold. [Photo: Brimstone] Valuable byproducts The first plant will mine rocks that are especially high in alumina, which can be used to make aluminum. The process is fairly straightforward. The company crushes the rocks into particles, and then uses chemicals to extract calcium for making cement. (The calcium is heated up, and then milled with gypsum.) Other residue becomes the SCM (supplementary cementitious materials), another product that’s used to make cement. Aluminum compounds are extracted separately. A concept rendering of a future industrial-scale Brimstone Rock Refinery plant. [Image: Brimstone] By making and selling more than one product from the same rock, all of the productsincluding the low-carbon cementcan be cost-competitive when theyre produced at an industrial scale. The process is inherently more efficient. Right now, other companies make cement, alumina, and SCM separately, and start each process by mining and grinding rock. Its three separate instances of mining and grinding, Finke says. We have one instance of mining and grinding, which means that we only have to develop a rock with a single quarry. We only have to have a single piece of equipment, and that piece of equipment can be larger, and then therefore benefit from economies of scale. The company will mine seven times less rock for its products than the standard processes today. [Photo: Brimstone] Strong demand While some other companies are making low-carbon alternatives to cement, Brimstone wanted to make ordinary Portland cementthe standard product already in use in the building industry. Brimstone’s cement meets ASTM International’s standards for Portland cement. It’s exactly as strong and durable and capable of handling extreme temperatures or chemical exposures. The SCM and alumina are also the same as what’s already on the market. “We make the exact same products,” Finke says. “Since these are all structural materials, we think that’s really importantno one wants to take a risk on structural components.” Large customers already want to buy it. Amazon, for example, recently announced plans to reserve volumes of the cement and SCM from the upcoming plant. The tech giant recently went through rounds of third-party tests of the materials, proving that it met requirements for strength and other factors. Amazon has also invested in the startup through its Climate Pledge Fund. Since the first plant will be a demonstration plant, the initial cost of the products will be higher, but companies like Amazon are willing to pay a premium. There’s strong demand, even as some companies are now less vocal about climate goals. “There are certain companies that care deeply about green attributes, and there are certain companies that don’t,” says Finke. “I think that the number of companies have changed somewhat, but the number of meaningful companies has not really changed. We see that steadiness.” [Photo: Brimstone] A careful funding strategy Brimstone has raised more than $80 million to date from investors including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures. As the team raised money, it never counted on the inevitability of government grants. “These subsidies are sort of at the political whims of any one party, and we don’t want our technology to be [subject to] political whims,” Finke says. “We want to have a solid economic footing. And that means that we need to have a fundraising strategy that doesn’t count subsidies until the dollars are in our bank account.” The DOE money was reimbursement-based, so funds would have been given out when the project hit certain milestones. It was also focused on funding for the final stages of building the plant. Because the company hadn’t counted on that funding, it has money available now to continue working on the project. The company recently announced that it was partnering with a quarry in Oklahoma, Dolese Bros., after evaluating 23,000 different quarries across the country. The location of the new plant, called the Rock Refinery, is being finalized now. It plans to begin operations by the end of the decade. [Photo: Brimstone] Looking ahead The company isn’t disclosing its fundraising strategy, though it says it has investors in place to help it continue building. Of course, the grant could have helped the company move even faster. The company’s policy team continues to work on its appeal for the grant. “Smelter-grade aluminum is a critical material that the United States cannot make,” Finke says. “The Trump administration is very interested in critical materials. And what we like to say is that if the Trump administration put out a grant for critical materials, we would have applied to that grantbasically the exact same project.” But the appeal process isn’t delaying the current work to build the plant and plan for future growth. “Subsidies would help our costs, absolutely,” Finke says. “But if it’s necessary to have those subsidies, it’s not likely to scale globally.”
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E-Commerce
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