This morning I was reading up on how tech companies had cut corners to get data to feed their generative AIs, and what really rang out in the article was the incessant need for more stuff to shove into learning models.

As a sidenote, it’s pretty amazing that people can get together, swap bodily fluids and grow another person that spends a life hopefully learning, with so much less of a carbon footprint, but the child is somewhat constrained by costs associated with learning.

So they cut corners. If a parent does that with a child, they generally end up in trouble, but wave the magic letters ‘AI’ around and suddenly it’s dressed different.

Anyway, I got really caught up thinking about it today and it seemed pretty much like the hungry ghosts described in Tibetan Buddhism. There’s a good article by PsychologyToday that connects the concept of hungry ghosts to addiction and other things, but the description of a hungry ghost says it all – small mouths, thin necks that are impossible to pass food through and bloated stomachs.

In fact, in pop culture, Pirates of the Caribbean’s Captain Barbossa pretty much demonstrated what a hungry ghost is.

So these companies are out there looking for data – Sam Altman is even mentioned in the NYT article as using synthetic data (data generated by AIs) to train future models.

Sounds like hungry ghosts to me.