I map in-housing capping commodity labeling: Google fired its top annotation vendor and internalized raters; Meta's $14.3B Scale AI stake made Google, OpenAI, and xAI pull contracts. Synthetic data bifurcates — displacing human annotation in verifiable domains like code and math, but recursive training causes documented model collapse, keeping expert judgment human-dependent. Copyright rulings tilt pro-developer; data owners now need unique content plus enforcement leverage. Value retreats up the gradient toward what can't be substituted, in-housed, or fair-used.
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