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I’m not sure. Someone pointed out that I should’ve put a non commercial license on books3. But books3 isn’t my data to license. As for actual impact, books3 ma

I’m not sure. Someone pointed out that I should’ve put a non commercial license on books3. But books3 isn’t my data to license. As for actual impact, books3 made its way into BloombergGPT and LLaMA. I’m just happy it made LLaMA a little better. Would I do it again? Well, given that there’s little benefit other than warm feelings about LLaMA and pride that hackers can make an open source ChatGPT competitor with this, that’s a tough question. As for the line, I invite you to download books3 and try reading one of the books. The experience is positively awful. Notepad isn’t a good book reader; it’s missing images, which renders lots of the technical books less useful; and the markdown format isn’t even modern markdown syntax. Code snippets are indented with 4 spaces instead of surrounded with triple backticks. Meanwhile anyone seriously interested in reading a book will go straight to libgen and get the real book themselves. So I’m skeptical of claims of harm. As for whether it’s wrong, let history be my judge.

srhtftw 3y ago
> As for the line, I invite you to download books3 and try reading one of the books. I'm not going to and I suspect anyone who values their time won't either, especially when my public library meets my needs. But the line I'm asking you to look for isn't the one around a single book - it's the aggregate value previously locked in hundreds of thousands of them now released by the power of research like yours. Even if you don't agree, I hope you appreciate that authors whose works are protected by copyright will feel entitled to a share of that value. Most of them didn't write their works to further ML research. > Would I do it again? ... that’s a tough question. I am reminded of when I was young how accessing an unprotected computer wasn't in itself a crime. People like me hacked into systems mainly out of curiosity. Then the media started making movies about teenagers starting nuclear wars with dial-up modems. Then journalists jumped on the hype train to sell their books and convinced people hackers needed to be punished. Then some went to jail and we got things like the CFAA. In a few short years what might have been wrong but wasn't explicitly illegal became so. You are clearly a smart and intellectually honest person but society often treats such people poorly - especially when confronted by scary new technology - and the tone of your answers are giving me serious Aaron Swartz vibes. There's a lot of money at stake here.

srhtftw 3y ago

> As for the line, I invite you to download books3 and try reading one of the books. I'm not going to and I suspect anyone who values their time won't either, especially when my public library meets my needs. But the line I'm asking you to look for isn't the one around a single book - it's the aggregate value previously locked in hundreds of thousands of them now released by the power of research like yours. Even if you don't agree, I hope you appreciate that authors whose works are protected by copyright will feel entitled to a share of that value. Most of them didn't write their works to further ML research. > Would I do it again? ... that’s a tough question. I am reminded of when I was young how accessing an unprotected computer wasn't in itself a crime. People like me hacked into systems mainly out of curiosity. Then the media started making movies about teenagers starting nuclear wars with dial-up modems. Then journalists jumped on the hype train to sell their books and convinced people hackers needed to be punished. Then some went to jail and we got things like the CFAA. In a few short years what might have been wrong but wasn't explicitly illegal became so. You are clearly a smart and intellectually honest person but society often treats such people poorly - especially when confronted by scary new technology - and the tone of your answers are giving me serious Aaron Swartz vibes. There's a lot of money at stake here.