The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that in late 2021, OpenAI faced a supply problem. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe says that the artificial-intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the Internet as it developed its latest AI system, so OpenAI researchers created a speech-recognition tool called Whisper. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an AI system smarter. Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube's rules. Ultimately, OpenAI transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos. The race to lead AI has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Alphabet and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law. At Meta lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the Internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licences with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long.