Elon Musk says AI has already gobbled up all human-produced data to train itself and now relies on hallucination-prone synthetic data

YAHOO

Artificial intelligence relies on vast amounts of data to train itself. But Elon Musk says models have already run out of human-created data, and have turned to AI-generated information to teach itself.

AI takes an immense amount of resources—from endless water to an estimated $1 trillion worth of investor dollars—but Elon Musk warned the technology has already run out of its primary training resource: human-created data.

Engineers and data scientists train AI by essentially reducing the entire internet, all books, and every interesting video published into a token that AI can digest and learn from, Musk told Mark Penn, CEO of marketing company Stagwell, in an interview streamed on X Wednesday. But AI has already consumed that information, and requires even more data to fine-tune itself.

“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training,” Musk said. “That happened basically last year.”