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Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

nytimes.com

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Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#41

Post by knome »

Onavo wrote: post #18
therobots927 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.

> Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.

I remember them having a 3D page unwarping tech they built as well so they could photograph rare and antique books without hacking them apart.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#42

Post by xnx »

jimmydoe wrote: post #30
aeon_ai wrote: post #8

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

Google scanned many books quite a while ago, probably way more than LibGen. Are they good to use them for training?

All those books were loaned by a library or purchased.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#44

Post by novok »

I wonder who will be the first country to make an exception to copyright law for model training libraries to attract tax revenue like Ireland did for tech companies in the EU. Japan is part of the way there, but you couldn't do a common crawl type thing. You could even make it a library of congress type of setup.

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#45

Post by dkdcio »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15
arjunchint wrote: post #10

Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers? Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.

From the article: > Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.

maybe I’m bad at math but paying >5% of your capital raised for a single fine doesn’t seem great from a business perspective

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#46

Post by siliconpotato »

dkdcio wrote: post #45
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.

maybe I’m bad at math but paying >5% of your capital raised for a single fine doesn’t seem great from a business perspective

It's VC money, I don't think anyone believes it's real money

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#48

Post by therobots927 »

Onavo wrote: post #18
therobots927 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.

> Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.

Oh I didn't know that. That's wild

Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

#50

Post by AlwaysRock »

varenc wrote: post #25
aeon_ai wrote: post #8

To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.

> Rainbows End was prescient in many ways. Agreed. Great book for those looking for a read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102439.Rainbows_End The author, Vernor Vinge, is also responsible for popularizing the term 'singularity'.

RIP to the legend. He has a lot of really fun ideas spread across his books.
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