AI 'Gold Rush' for chatbot training data could run out of human-written text

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems like ChatGPT could soon run out of what keeps making them smarter - the tens of trillions of words people have written and shared online.

A new study released Thursday by research group Epoch AI projects that tech firms will exhaust the supply of publicly available training data for AI models by roughly the turn of the decade.

Comparing it to a "literal gold rush" that depletes finite natural resources, Tamay Besiroglu, an author of the study, said the AI field might face challenges in maintaining its current pace of progress once it drains the reserves of human-generated writing.


In the short term, tech companies like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Google are racing to secure and sometimes pay for high-quality data sources to train their AI large language modelsby signing deals to tap into the steady flow of sentences coming out of Reddit forums and news media outlets.


In the longer term, there won't be enough new blogs, news articles and social media commentary to sustain the current trajectory of AI development, putting pressure on companies to tap into sensitive data now considered private - such as emails or text messages - or relying on less-reliable "synthetic data" spit out by the chatbots themselves.

AP