Those who already have YouTube’s new artificial intelligence (AI) feature will see a Jump Ahead button when double-tapping to skip ahead.
Touching it transports the user to the best part of a video while skipping the boring stuff—great for folks like this author who are sick and tired of creators blabbering for ten minutes without saying anything just because they need ads to roll.
As per the official YouTube blog, the feature makes use of AI and viewership data, enabling it to jump over the most skipped sections. Google acknowledges that the Jump Ahead button may not appear on all YouTube videos.
AI saves you from sitting through boring YouTube videos
The button is already live in YouTube’s Android app and is scheduled to launch in YouTube’s iPhone app in the next few weeks. There’s just one problem: this is a paid feature like offline watching, picture-in-picture. background play, etc. Also, the Jump Ahead button only appears for Premium subscribers in the United States.
As YouTube has been filled with junk lately, I’m eager to reclaim many minutes lost to videos with long and tedious intros. I’m not dissing YouTube. In fact, I’m happily paying for my Premium subscription every month to stop the ads.
YouTube as a source of AI training data
YouTube videos are apparently a gold mine of AI training data. One company transcribed thousands of YouTube clips from a bunch of popular sources like education channels, branded news channels and YouTube personalities. It then sold the “YouTube Subtitles” dataset to companies like Apple and Nivida.
Apple says it only used this dataset while developing its open-sourced large language model, dubbed OpenELM. It has not incorporated any OpenELM models into Apple Intelligence, which arrives this fall.
Instead, Apple Intelligence models rely on a combination of licensed data, specifically selected to enhance specific features, and publicly available data scrapped from websites that have not opted out via the robots.txt file.