> In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI

Oh boy. The more I learn about how genAI companies work, the more detestable they appear to be.

I don't like Anthropic, I think their "marketing through fear" approach to be shitty and frankly I'm over the AI "boom" anyway.

BUT... here's the only line in that whole article that really matters, because this is a headline meant to create an impression that isn't corrected for quite a while.

> The court documents don't indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers

Books are routinely pulped and recycled, they aren't holy, and if they aren't rare then frankly who cares what techniques they use to scan them? The issue is whether or not "AI" learning represents fair use, which the courts so far have ruled that it does.

    Opinion suggests AI models do generally violate law.

Reuters news on the lawsuit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44375269

Getting flashbacks to Vernor Vinge's book Rainbows End, where there's a project to rapidly digitize the collection of the UCSD's Geisel Library by shredding all the books and photographing the fragments of pages and reassembling them via computer programs.

It's set in 2025.

Reminds me of "Rainbow's End" by Vinge. There's a machine that's like a giant worm, which slithers down the stacks in a library, vacuuming up all the books. They pass through shredders, and then the shredded remains fly down the body of the worm, which is studded with cameras. The cameras photograph the pieces and then software reconstructs the content of the books based on unique shapes of the shreds, like solving a million simultaneous jigsaw puzzles. The paper is excreted and recycled or burned.

This reminds me scrolls on Diablo. Soon real books will all disappear to dust as AI stats are improved.

More discussion:

A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367850

When they run out of training data, they have to rely upon better reasoning algos which take time to develop and that’s when the party ends. The purpose of IT investment is to increase competitiveness through better efficiency and thus capture more of the market. If everyone is using the same model trained on the same max dataset, it stops being much of a competitive advantage. I’ve already heard the stock-option Billionaires bloviating with their intuition shaped by narrow corporate experiences that the AI objective is to increase GDP or similar, but obviously the ol’ man in the corner office ain’t payin’ for that and so at some point, the question of how to keep the Three Mile Island running to power this sucker becomes very real. The answer is sort of scary, if you think about it…

This to be expected.

The book ‘Empire of AI’ by Karen Hao is recomended.

Depending on their approach this might not be as bad as it seems.

Some large percentage of physical books really aren't a precious commodity. They may be precious to you as an individual but chances are no-one else is going to be that bothered. For example, a second hand book wholesaler I just found with a quick google will sell you pallets of books for 25c/book which would only go down as your purchase size went up. If they don't sell then it seems pretty likely those books are going to get pulped anyway.

If they were buying the books new and then essentially pulping them after scanning that does feel wasteful, but if they were buying in bulk from a second hand wholesaler then Im kinda glad the content of those books is going into something useful before they get pulped.

Why does a good LLM require millions of books? No person requires/reads nearly that many books to function!

Most well-educated persons have read far fewer books yet are presumably more intelligent than any LLM. This is a hint toward solving the problem of AI: the industry would do well to pay attention to that hint.

In other words, the industry should concentrate on creating an AI that has a far more limited corpus. Of course, maybe they are doing so but not telling anyone about it. I certainly wouldn't reveal my best ideas. At the same time one must remember that, only a few centuries ago, people learned to read English by studying the King James version of the Old Testament, a single book [not to say that a lot of work didn't go into that particular text: it really is a work of art in the English language].

Perhaps the AI industry must maintain a illusion for the unwashed masses (and especially investors) that each generation of LLM AI must always be bigger to reach AGI, whereas the truth is that some guy in his study will find the key that ties LLMs to human intelligence and will, any day, render the entire industry obsolete.

This has to be the most mind blowing article I have read in a while.

1. The sheer scale - millions of books.

2. The sheer destruction - millions of books.

3. Judge declaring it fair use.

4. How could they be not noticed by people around? is the office location isolated