Comment on The Problem With Innovation: Big Companies Are Hogging All the Gains

Artificial intelligence 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 companies will exhaust the supply of publicly available training data for AI language models by roughly the turn of the decade — sometime between 2026 and 2032. 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 models – for instance, by 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. “There is a serious bottleneck here,” Besiroglu said.

Groundbreakings for office buildings hit an all-time low in Q1 2024, according to JLL. Want more stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the free, daily ResiClub newsletter.

The aftermath of the Great Resignation is still wreaking havoc on our workforce, says this HR expert. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

In their new book, Cristina Alaimo and Jannis Kallinikos trace the history of data and how it impacts workers. The invention and use of clay tokens represents a foundational episode in the history of record-making. They illustrate the power of data and the different cognitive and social practices that develop in conjunction or around it. 

If you are one of the millions of people who suddenly went puzzle-crazy during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, then you may have heard of Liberty Puzzles, a 19-year-old Boulder company that specializes in manufacturing high-end, hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles. Liberty’s works became highly sought-after commodities for people who were looking to spend their time doing something creative during their downtime.

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