Who Owns Your Expertise? David Bennahum and Nicholas Nadeau on The Media Copilot

Pete Pachal covers AI for Fast Company and writes The Media Copilot. He invited Onix co-founders David Bennahum and Nicholas Nadeau onto his podcast with one question: if AI is going to generate enormous value from human knowledge, who should own that value?

Pachal’s written companion piece, Who owns your expertise in the age of AI?, frames the stakes for anyone who makes a living from what they know:

For creators, that means you can turn your expertise into something others can subscribe to rather than something scraped out from under you.

— Pete Pachal, The Media Copilot

The authorized version

David describes what Onix builds as the authorized version of an expert. The alternative already exists: the bootleg, assembled by general-purpose models from whatever the expert has ever said in public. The bootleg carries the expert’s name and none of the expert’s accountability.

Nicholas explains why a scrape of published work cannot reach the real thing:

Expertise is factual knowledge plus a point of view, a perspective and judgment.

— Nicholas Nadeau, CTO and Co-founder of Onix

The facts are on the internet. The judgment is not. Onix trains each expert’s model on what the two of them call dark data: the unpublished notes and private materials that show how an expert thinks, not just what they have said. That is the knowledge frontier models cannot average, because it was never there to scrape.

Who gets paid

The conversation turns to the creator economy, where the answer to Pachal’s question has so far been “the platform.” Onix’s answer is the expert. The deal is simple: no cost to join, no cost to leave, non-exclusive. Onix trains the expert’s model and nothing else with their knowledge. Experts set their own price and keep 70%. If an expert leaves, the model and the data are deleted.

David sums up the mission in one line:

Take back control of your genius.

— David Bennahum, CEO and Co-founder of Onix

The episode also gets into data sovereignty, subscription knowledge products, and whether a model trained on one expert hallucinates less than a model trained on everyone. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, and read Pachal’s post on The Media Copilot. To meet the experts who own their models on Onix, visit onix.life.