Long trajectories go for ~$1k each, data mining breaks even at 2k samples

HanchungLee · x · 2026-09-20

Hanchung Lee shares current data-market pricing: long trajectories sell for roughly $1,000 each, meaning a data acquisition effort needs to mine 2,000 trajectories to break even, and 3,000 to cover engineering and token costs. He notes there is still considerable art to this and it is far from straightforward.

Quoted Brian Roemmele pushes back on the belief that old enterprise data holds magic: he found back in the 1980s that bankrupt companies' printed data was valuable precisely because printing imposed barriers, whereas modern Slack chats are extremely low-quality, performative, and taint models much like Reddit data. Having sifted through datasets being sold for a client, he found mostly trivial exchanges like 'did you get part 886-7?'

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