I wonder how much it would cost to buy every book that you'd want to train a model.

500,000 x $20 = $10 million

Obviously there would be handling costs + scanning costs, so that’s the floor.

Maybe $20 million total? Plus, of course, the time it would take to execute.

The real expense is in the data centers/hardware.

The cost of the books is negligible in comparison.

	▲	Scoundreller 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Somewhere a gritty warehouse in a developing country is receiving shipping containers of old books, massive teams manually flipping each page as a 2nd hand Canon digicam takes a pic of each page, to be OCR’d by the same AI being trained. Once the book is done, 99% of them go into the furnace at the district heating boiler next door. The other 1% back to a developed country for resale.