Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI
Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever's available online.
Get smart on it
Amazon is purchasing rare books, removing their spines, and scanning them to use as training data for artificial intelligence language models. The company needs enormous amounts of text to train these systems, and rare or out-of-print books offer a valuable source of material that has not yet been ingested from the internet. Rare texts are particularly valuable for training because anything published before 2022 could not have been written by an AI system, which helps prevent "model collapse," a problem that occurs when AI systems degrade in quality after training on too much AI-generated text.
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