Panopticon is a prison design where the guard tower can see every cell and every inmate at all times, while inmates cannot see if they are being watched.

Panopticon is also the term used for the theoretical upper limit for a dataset of all text spoken and written by every human on Earth. How much data would that be on a disk?

If Joe is average, and in one day he:

• writes three emails, one with an attached document

• sends ten text messages

• talks on the phone for thirty minutes

• talks and writes offline for three hours

The text from all that activity adds up to about one megabyte.

How does that compare to the amount of text that is used to train large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT?

GPT-4 was announced on March 14, 2023. OpenAI released a technical paper but it did not include the size of the training set. The previous version, GPT-3, was trained on a corpus of 570 gigabytes of plain text, which was roughly ten times larger than the dataset GPT-2 was trained on. GPT-2’s training set was about ten times larger than GPT-1. If we assume 10x growth, then perhaps GPT-4 was trained on 5 terabytes of text.

GPT-4 performs well enough on standardized tests to apply to Stanford:

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that an AI can get smart by reading “just” a few terabytes of text. We know humans read much less than that and some of them are really smart. If you are a nerd and read the equivalent of 60 books a year, for 60 years, that would be about 3.6 gigabytes of text.

There are economic incentives to build towards a Panopticon dataset. It’s safe to assume the Chinese Communist Party is pursuing it. Uyghurs would say it's already here.

Most of a panopticon text corpus would be useless babble, and it would be incredibly expensive to manage. But that may not stop people from trying to build it.

Data collectors have an asymmetric advantage over the rest of us. It’s easy to collect data on people and not be seen doing it. It gets easier every year. I remember joining a company and being shown an app called FullStory which replays user sessions. Our users had no idea they were being recorded. We could see, in real-time, how they moved their mouse, what pages they visited, and what they typed. It’s a toy example, but it was creepy.

Every year more and better sensors occupy our day-to-day spaces, capturing data besides plain text. These things are convenient. Most of these devices connect to the internet. We’re all feeding the beast.

The wheels of capitalism turn in boring office meetings, marketing slide shows, and analytics dashboards. The latest and greatest AI models train on ever-growing data streams, spinning on GPUs in sterile server farms. The people in-charge have almost zero accountability.

When I interact with GPT-4, it feels like we are summoning a demon or an alien has landed. Its appetite for data grows and grows. I find myself wanting to read a book and not think about it.