Unlike US firms performing massive web scrapes, European AI projects are constrained by the AI Act and authorship rights. This forces them to prioritize curated, "organic" datasets from sources like libraries and publishers. This difficult curation process becomes a competitive advantage, leading to higher-quality linguistic models.
LLMs have hit a wall by scraping nearly all available public data. The next phase of AI development and competitive differentiation will come from training models on high-quality, proprietary data generated by human experts. This creates a booming "data as a service" industry for companies like Micro One that recruit and manage these experts.
While other AI models may be more powerful, Adobe's Firefly offers a crucial advantage: legal safety. It's trained only on licensed data, protecting enterprise clients like Hollywood studios from costly copyright violations. This makes it the most commercially viable option for high-stakes professional work.
While US AI labs debate abstract "constitutions" to define model values, Poland's AI project is preoccupied with a more immediate problem: navigating strict data usage regulations. These legal frameworks act as a de facto set of constraints, making an explicit "Polish AI constitution" a lower priority for now.
For years, access to compute was the primary bottleneck in AI development. Now, as public web data is largely exhausted, the limiting factor is access to high-quality, proprietary data from enterprises and human experts. This shifts the focus from building massive infrastructure to forming data partnerships and expertise.
The future of valuable AI lies not in models trained on the abundant public internet, but in those built on scarce, proprietary data. For fields like robotics and biology, this data doesn't exist to be scraped; it must be actively created, making the data generation process itself the key competitive moat.
Customizing a base model with proprietary data is only effective if a company possesses a massive corpus. At least 10 billion high-quality tokens are needed *after* aggressive deduplication and filtering. This high threshold means the strategy is only viable for the largest corporations, a much higher bar than most businesses realize.
The market reality is that consumers and businesses prioritize the best-performing AI models, regardless of whether their training data was ethically sourced. This dynamic incentivizes labs to use all available data, including copyrighted works, and treat potential fines as a cost of doing business.
Data is becoming more expensive not from scarcity, but because the work has evolved. Simple labeling is over. Costs are now driven by the need for pricey domain experts for specialized data preparation and creative teams to build complex, synthetic environments for training agents.
As algorithms become more widespread, the key differentiator for leading AI labs is their exclusive access to vast, private data sets. XAI has Twitter, Google has YouTube, and OpenAI has user conversations, creating unique training advantages that are nearly impossible for others to replicate.
Anthropic maintains a competitive edge by physically acquiring and digitizing thousands of old books, creating a massive, proprietary dataset of high-quality text. This multi-year effort to build a unique data library is difficult to replicate and may contribute to the distinct quality of its Claude models.