Dystopian thriller “Soylent Green” ends with the hero discovering that the mystery food that sustains New York’s citizens, and whose name the movie bears, is actually made of human beings. Reports that Meta Platforms may acquire 49 per cent of artificial intelligence company Scale AI for $15bn illustrate a similar plot twist. AI, too, is people.
So far, building AI has mostly been an exercise in managing scarce resources of the inanimate kind. Top-end chips, for example, are in short supply; power constraints weigh. Most of Meta’s capital expenditure, estimated at up to $72bn this year, has been earmarked for servers and data centres, the tech equivalent of bricks and mortar.
But other ingredients are becoming scarce too. One is decent data, essential for training AI models effectively. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has warned of reaching “peak data” in the same way the planet is heading towards “peak oil”.