We often get asked to consider, advise, and strategise on how to invest in AI. Increasingly, we’re hearing the AI bubble will burst, but for those who have lived through the last three decades of Australian housing prices, maybe it won’t! Perhaps #data #scarcity will drive long-term growth.
#AI democratises the more advanced things computers do (automation). For example, we speak to Large Language Models ( #LLMs) in English, stuff happens, and we can get an answer back in English. To do that, it must appear to understand English and common facts (strictly speaking, it doesn’t). We never taught it English grammar, but one can imagine that if you read 300 billion words, and even with the most straightforward strategies for analysing all those passages, you would notice a pattern - English grammar.
The emerging business models (and research methods) that exploit them are ingenious and profound! We won’t go through examples here, but they drive massive investments in computing facilities to train and apply AI. Is that the bubble that busts? Perhaps not.
Three hundred billion words is a lot. Is the Internet an endless supply of words? What happens if we run out of words?
If and when data becomes scarce, we expect the investment flows to adjust - your data could become the most valuable part of the ecosystem.
Training AI requires more data than we have. A recently revised Epoch AI study finds LLMs’ need for data will exceed the available stock of public human text data between 2026 and 2032. That is close! The signals are there - increasingly, we see major AI players signing deals with strategic data partners and publishers. Organisations, innovators, and researchers realise that LLMs affect their long-standing business models and are changing their licenses and access methods to their published data to ensure continued sustainability. Data scarcity will not burst the AI bubble, but it will solidify where the value is for those prepared.
How prepared are you for this shift? And how do you make sure you don’t miss out?