UPenn Wharton School Associate Professor Ethan Mollick weighs in on the Biden White House's new guidelines for artificial intelligence in the workplace on'Fox News Live.' 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.

It is undeniable that technological advances and cultural shifts have transformed our online universe over the years--especially with the recent surge in AI-generated content--but Deckelmann still isn't afraid of people on the internet. She believes they are its future. In the summer of 2022, when she stepped into the newly created role of CPTO, Deckelmann didn't know that a few months later, the race to build generative AI would accelerate to a breakneck pace. With the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT and other large language models, and the multibillion-dollar funding cycle that followed, 2023 became the year of the chatbot. And because these models require heaps of cheap (or, preferably, even free) content to function, Wikipedia's tens of millions of articles have become a rich source of fuel. To anyone who's spent time on the internet, it makes sense that bots and bot builders would look to Wikipedia to strengthen their own knowledge collections.