tech
Amazon, once an online bookseller, is destroying rare books to train AI models
Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever's available online.
TL;DR
- Amazon is buying rare books and scanning them for AI training.
- A tracking device placed in a rare book led to an Amazon facility in Las Vegas (VGT3).
- Companies need vast amounts of text to train LLMs, and rare books offer a new data source.
- Pre-2022 texts are valuable because they are guaranteed to be human-written, preventing LLM 'model collapse' from ingesting AI-generated content.