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The Vatican Library contains roughly 1.1 million printed books and around 75,000 codices, only a small percentage of which have been digitised.
by cgh 6mo ago
The Vatican Library contains roughly 1.1 million printed books and around 75,000 codices, only a small percentage of which have been digitised.
- drob518 6mo agoWhich is what percent of the world’s content? 0.000000001% or something similar. It’s nothing in the scheme of things. To put it another way, if we were to digitize that continent and train on it, our AIs would not get noticeably better in any way. It doesn’t move the needle.
- fwip 6mo ago1.1 million being 0.000000001% implies a total count of 1e17 books in the world - the real number is closer to 1e8.
- drob518 6mo agoYou’re missing the point. And we’re not just talking about books, whatever that might mean. We’re talking about all documents ever made. Every magazine article, every blog and web page, every Word doc, etc. I’m pretty sure that whatever is in the Vatican archives is tiny by comparison. Given the age of the Vatican archives, I can also guarantee that many of those “books” are nothing more than page fragments. Very few will be full codices or long scrolls. Many will date before the printing press when document production was slow and laborious.
- hatthew 6mo agoReddit alone contains about the same quantity of text (~10 billion posts * 10 words per post, vs 1 million books * 100k words per book). Messaging and document platforms (google docs, slack, discord, telegram, etc.) probably each have 1-3 orders of magnitude more than reddit. To your/GP's point though, those private platforms probably haven't been slurped up by LLMs yet.