AI Companies Buy Failed Startup Chat Logs #technology #ai #startup

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Failed companies are selling old Slack chats and email archives to train artificial intelligence. Yes, in the AI-driven capitalist dystopia that we live in, even your failure has been distilled down to a monetizable commodity, with some companies offering up to $100,000 for the chat logs of defunct startups, literally training on why companies fail, or as these companies put it, what they want is reinforcement learning gyms, RL gyms, which are simulated environments built using real-world company data that allow AI agents to practice completing workflow tasks, and in some capacities understanding why a company failed. And the companies that are doing this are actually other companies that help startups shut down.

[00:00:42]Yes, when you shut down a startup, you have to hire a company to help you finish your payroll, taxes, investor settlements, etc., etc. So, uh, Simple Closure this week introduced a new product called AssetHub, helping failed startups monetize their data, reclaim a little bit of extra money during the shutdown process, and what they get is workflows, documents, Slack messages, emails, and supposedly they're only using this to train their AI on how a real office or real business works.

[00:01:10]But in my opinion, they're probably training it on why businesses fail, which is kind of frightening. And the frightening thing about this isn't that it's a bad idea, it's actually quite a good one, but it's literally what Karl Marx said about capitalism, that it has to feed on the next human experience, that it will continue to drain or monetize human experience. And we already see this from religion to the rage-bait machines of social media.

[00:01:35]Almost every single human emotion or experience has a dollar value attached to it. And now in the AI world, your business failures have a dollar value. I guess the bigger failure you have, the more valuable or com- commoditizable it could be, which is downright dystopian and frightening to me.