Elon Musk says all human data for AI training 'exhausted'

Artificial intelligence companies have run out of data for training their models and have "exhausted" the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk has said. The world's richest person suggested technology firms would have to turn to "synthetic" data – or material created by AI models – to build and fine-tune new systems, a process already taking place with the fast-developing technology. "The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year," said Musk in an interview livestreamed on his social media platform, X. AI models such as the GPT-4o model powering the ChatGPT chatbot are "trained" on a vast array of data taken from the internet, where they in effect learn to spot patterns in that information – allowing them to predict, for instance, the next word in a sentence. Musk said the "only way" to counter the lack of source material for training new models was to move to synthetic data created by AI.