From a systems design perspective, $3,000 per book makes this approach completely unscalable compared to web scraping. It's like choosing between a O(n) and O(n²) algorithm - legally compliant data acquisition has fundamentally different scaling characteristics than the 'move fast and break things' approach most labs took initially.

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BoorishBears 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know if anyone has actually read the article or the ruling, but this is about pirating books.

Anthropic went back and bought->scanned->destroyed physical copies of them afterward... but they pirated them first, and that's what this settlement is about.

The judge also said:

> “The training use was a fair use,” he wrote. “The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.”

So you don't need to pay $3,000 per book you train on unless you pirate them.

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pbd 7 days ago | parent [-]

i agree. this is very gray imo. e.g., books in India have cheap EEE editions compared to the ones in US/Europe. so they can pre-process the data in India & then compile it in US. does that save them from piracy rules & reduces cost as well.

	▲	BoorishBears 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mean relative to the cost of pre-training, books are going to be cheap even if you buy them in the US (as demonstrated by the fact Anthropic bought them after) For post-training, other data sources (like human feedback and/or examples) are way more expensive than books

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thfuran 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't a flat price per book quite plainly O(n)? If not, what's n?

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whimsicalism 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

more of a large difference in constant factor, like a galactic algorithm for data trawling