AI firms will soon exhaust most of the internet’s data

In 2006 fei-fei li, then at the University of Illinois, now at Stanford University, saw how mining the internet might help to transform ai research. Linguistic research had identified 80,000 “noun synonym sets”, or synsets: groups of synonyms that described the same sort of thing. The billions of images on the internet, Dr Li reckoned, must offer hundreds of examples of each synset. Assemble enough of them and you would have an ai training resource far beyond anything the field had ever seen. “A lot of people are paying attention to models,” she said. “Let’s pay attention to data.” The result was ImageNet.