China faces critical AI bottleneck as high-quality training data runs dry

For decades, the world's digital commons — every book, article, and forum post — seemed inexhaustible, a vast inheritance of human thought freely available to train the machines of the future. Now, researchers warn that inheritance may be nearly spent. China's AI ambitions, long shadowed by chip restrictions, face a quieter and perhaps more fundamental constraint: the finite nature of human language itself, with global high-quality text data potentially exhausted within six years.