The AI pre-training age will soon come to an end — OpenAI co-founder

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever recently gave a lecture at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024 conference in Vancouver, Canada arguing that the age of artificial intelligence pre-training is ending and forecasted the rise of an AI superintelligence.

According to Sutskever, increasing computing power through better hardware, software, and machine-learning algorithms outpaces the total amount of data available for AI model training. The AI researcher likened data to fossil fuels, which will eventually run out. Sutskever said:

"Data is not growing because we have but one internet. You could even say that data is the fossil fuel of AI. It was created somehow, and now we use it, and we've achieved peak data, and there will be no more — we have to deal with the data that we have."
The OpenAI co-founder predicted that agentic AI, synthetic data, and inference time computing were the next evolutions of artificial intelligence that will eventually give rise to an AI superintelligence.