The "greater work" is scanning then burning millions of books btw

satvikpendem 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't confuse Google and Anthropic. Google already has a huge corpus of books via Google Books, none of which they burned after since they were borrowed books. The recent Anthropic settlement does not require them to burn books at all, they just can't keep them indefinitely whether physically or virtually. Nothing stops them from donating the books again.

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impossiblefork 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, but surely the problem isn't that the law requires anything in particular, but rather that a bunch of books are getting bought by an organization that is likely to systematically destroy them and that there among those books are a niche books or unusual books that would end up disappearing, and thus that cultural artifacts and knowledge might be disappearing due to this.

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sirwhinesalot 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anthropic destroyed the books, they can't donate them again.

	▲	satvikpendem 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, the law does not require them to destroy the books is my point.

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Legend2440 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I really don't care. Books aren't sacred, and the information in them will be far more accessible once digitized and trained than it would sitting on a shelf where no one will read it.

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philipkglass 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Google was scanning millions of books before the LLM craze, and they didn't burn them. They partnered with libraries and built their own non-destructive scanning hardware. I'm guessing this comment is really about Anthropic, but they are distinct companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Scanning_of_books

EDIT: I commented before reading the FT article. The comment by jackb4040 makes more sense to me now: some AlphaFold team members are moving to Anthropic, the company that has been in the news for shredding scanned books.

	▲	jackb4040 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I actually didn't mean it literally, more just the general sense that any job you're doing that isn't sufficiently evil will eventually be rolled up. But that's interesting that there is now a literal connection between these two stories!