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

The internet provided not only the images, but also the resources for labelling them. Once search engines had delivered pictures of what they took to be dogs, cats, chairs or whatever, these images were inspected and annotated by humans recruited through Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing service provided by Amazon which allows people to earn money by doing mundane tasks. The result was a database of millions of curated, verified images. It was through using parts of ImageNet for its training that, in 2012, a program called AlexNet demonstrated the remarkable potential of “deep learning”—that is to say, of neural networks with many more layers than had previously been used. This was the beginning of the ai boom, and of a labelling industry designed to provide it with training data.