Headline, September 10 2023/ ''' DATA ''DOOMSTERS'' DAMN '''

 

''' DATA ''DOOMSTER'' 

DAMN '''

! A STANDING OVATION FROM THE WORLD ! : JUST see how far ' The World Students Society ' - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world - has come. '' Now watch how far !WOW! will go. ''

'' !WOW! DUSTING OFF THE GUNS.'' DEMAND FOR DATA IS GROWING SO FAST that the stock of high-quality text available for training may be exhausted by 2026, reckons Epoch AI, a research outfit.

The latest AI models from Google and Meta, two tech giants, are likely trained on over 1 trillion words  By comparison, the sum total of English words on Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is about 4 billion.

It is not only the size of datasets that count. The better the data, the better the model. Text-based models are ideally trained on long-form, well-written, factually accurate writing, notes Russell Kaplan of Scale AI, a data startup. Models fed this information are more likely to produce similarly high-quality output.

LIKEWISE, AI chatbots give better answers when asked to explain their working step-by-step, increasing demands for sources like textbooks.

Specialized information sets are also prized, as they allow models to be ''finetuned'' for more niche applications. Microsoft purchase of GitHub, a repository for software code, for $7.5 billion in 2018 helped it develop a code-writing AI tool.

NOT SO LONG AGO ANALYSTS WERE openly wondering whether artificial intelligence [AI]  would be the death of Adobe, a maker of software for creative types.

NEW TOOLS like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, which conjures up pictures from text, seemed set to render Adobe's image-editing offerings redundant. As recently as April, Seeking Alpha, a financial news-site, published an article headlined ''Is AI the Adobe Killer?''

FAR from it. Adobe has used its database of hundreds of millions of stock photos to build its own suite of AI tools, dubbed Firefly. Since its release in March the software has been used to create over 1 billion images, avoiding mining the internet for images, as rivals did.

Adobe has skirted the deepening dispute over copyright that now dogs the industry. The firm's share price has risen by 36% since Firefly was launched.

Adobe's triumph over the doomsters illustrates a wider point about the contest for dominance in the fast-developing market for AI tools. The supersize models powering the latest wave of so-called  ''generative'' AI rely on oodles of data.

Having already helped themselves to much of the internet, often without permission.

AI firms are now seeking out new data sources to sustain the feeding frenzy. Meanwhile, companies with vast troves of the stuff are weighing up how best to profit from it. A data land grab is underway.

The two essential ingredients for an AI model are datasets, on which the system is trained, and processing power, through which the model detects relationships within and among those datasets.

Those ingredients are to an extent substitutes : a model can be improved either by ingesting more data or adding more processing power. The latter, however, is becoming difficult owing to a shortage of specialist chips, leading model-builders to be doubly focused on seeking out data.

As demand for data grows, accessing it is getting trickier, with content creators now demanding compensation for material that has been ingested into AI models.

A number of copyright-infringement cases have already been brought against model-builders in America. A group of authors, including Sarah Silverman, a comedian, are suing OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, and Meta.

A group of artists are similarly suing Stability AI, which builds text-to-image tools and Midjourney.

Startups are piling in and on. In April Weaviate, an AI-focused database business, raised $50 million at a valuation of $200 million. 

Barely a week later PineCone, a rival, raised $100 million at a $750 million valuation. Earlier this month Neon, another database startup, raised an additional $46 million in funding. 

The scramble for data is only just getting started.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on AI, Data, Startups, Market Power, and Students, continues. The World Students Society thanks author The Economist.

With most respectful dedication to The Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society -for every subject : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - X !E-WOW! : The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless