There are commercial services that provide residential proxies, i.e. you get to tunnel your scraper or bot traffic through actual residential connections. (see: Bright Data, oxylabs, etc.)
They accomplish this by providing home users with some app that promises to pay them money for use of their connection. (see: HoneyGain, peer2profit, etc.)
Interestingly, the companies selling the tunnel service to companies and the ones paying home users to run an app are sometimes different, or at least they use different brands to cater to the two sides of the market. It also wouldn't surprise me if they sold capacity to each other.
I suspect some of these LLM companies (or the ones they outsource to capture data) some of their traffic through these residential proxy services. It's funny because some of these companies already have a foothold inside homes (Google Nest and Amazon Alexa devices, etc.) but for a number of reasons (e.g. legal) they would probably rather go through a third-party.
They accomplish this by providing home users with some app that promises to pay them money for use of their connection. (see: HoneyGain, peer2profit, etc.)
Interestingly, the companies selling the tunnel service to companies and the ones paying home users to run an app are sometimes different, or at least they use different brands to cater to the two sides of the market. It also wouldn't surprise me if they sold capacity to each other.
I suspect some of these LLM companies (or the ones they outsource to capture data) some of their traffic through these residential proxy services. It's funny because some of these companies already have a foothold inside homes (Google Nest and Amazon Alexa devices, etc.) but for a number of reasons (e.g. legal) they would probably rather go through a third-party.