> The law is effectively forcing companies to spend millions re-scanning the same books over and over for no reason.
Oh but the reason is that they're now making $3 billion/year, partially because of those books. I see an argument for the inefficiency behind having to rescan books that are already scanned, but not the cost. If there was a way to buy pre-scanned books from Google Books or whatever then I somewhat see where you're coming from.
I argue that there were positive effects of Anthropic having to buy and scan physical books:
* The choices people made choosing which physical books to buy and scan helped make Claude what it is. Personally I sense a difference between Claude and OpenAI and Gemini, and part of it comes down to the choices they made in training material. Sorry to go on and on, but how many choices here were made because it was a rainy day and the trains were down, so an intern went to bookstore A instead of bookstore B?
* While buying the books used didn't help the authors it helped the struggling bookstores selling their books. Literal dollars into the hands of local workers. When I fast forward to today and see how LLM companies are literally stealing the energy from the communities their data centers are based in, and polluting them with shitty power plants I can at least think of that as one positive outcome, even if it only happened once.
As far as the 7 million+ books Anthropic didn't pay for, their series B in 2022 brought in $580 million. They could have afforded those books.
Oh but the reason is that they're now making $3 billion/year, partially because of those books. I see an argument for the inefficiency behind having to rescan books that are already scanned, but not the cost. If there was a way to buy pre-scanned books from Google Books or whatever then I somewhat see where you're coming from.
I argue that there were positive effects of Anthropic having to buy and scan physical books:
* The choices people made choosing which physical books to buy and scan helped make Claude what it is. Personally I sense a difference between Claude and OpenAI and Gemini, and part of it comes down to the choices they made in training material. Sorry to go on and on, but how many choices here were made because it was a rainy day and the trains were down, so an intern went to bookstore A instead of bookstore B?
* While buying the books used didn't help the authors it helped the struggling bookstores selling their books. Literal dollars into the hands of local workers. When I fast forward to today and see how LLM companies are literally stealing the energy from the communities their data centers are based in, and polluting them with shitty power plants I can at least think of that as one positive outcome, even if it only happened once.
As far as the 7 million+ books Anthropic didn't pay for, their series B in 2022 brought in $580 million. They could have afforded those books.