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Perhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on published research, this "AI wave" is at odds with that and seems to be driven by greed (although

Perhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on published research, this "AI wave" is at odds with that and seems to be driven by greed (although they'll claim some arms race or something to help themselves sleep at night). There should be a new ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) policy being pushed recognizing the important role this plays. Although ESG and all norms have been set aside in this grim new world it seems.

cute_boi 2mo ago
Forget publishing, companies like misanthropic are buying rare books and destroying it. [1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
- drivebyhooting 2mo ago
  What do you mean?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - KolmogorovComp 2mo ago
    To scan them, they usually have to resort breaking them into individual pages.
  - taude 2mo ago
    they're refering to this: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-de...
  - wonnage 2mo ago
    https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli... The scanning process destroys the book.
    - jazzyjackson 2mo ago
      Note it doesn't have to, it's just faster to. Internet Archive scans their books one page at a time keeping the book intact and stored in a warehouse.
      - usef- 2mo ago
        They do: the judge in the Anthropic case said that destroying them means that the text is being transferred, and so therefore can be fair use. > "The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other." (I believe the reasoning is that the author is not being financially disadvantaged by more copies of their book existing). So the current law prefers them to destroy.
        golem14 2mo ago
        Rare books seldom are under copyright and that’s not a concern then.
        usef- 2mo ago
        Is that easy to tell for each book, though? I usually hear that it's extremely hard to track down the copyright owners for many older things. That's the reason the film/video industry often gives for not digitising the backlog online, and I would expect their volume to be much easier to handle than the book industry.
        golem14 2mo ago
        It’s not easy, but there are good heuristics. If it fetches 10s of thousands at an auction, like an original Gutenberg bible or something, don’t destroy. If it’s my thesis from high school, destroying while making a copy is ok. It’s really not important to come with a totally bulletproof 100% accurate rule here.
- jsphweid 2mo ago
  When they do this, are they buying a single copy of say Book A and destroying a single Book A copy? Or are they buying every copy they can find of Book A and destroying all of them?
  - ComputerPerson 2mo ago
    Elon recently (2d) tweeted about making sure they preserve rare books and "scan them the hard way". That tweet launched a cultural wave of opposition regarding the debinding of rare books. The discussion has been around, but it's flared significantly recently. Not sure if that's what the person you're responding to is specifically inflamed about. Regardless, old/rare books are certainly being acquired and destroyed.
    - gowld 2mo ago
      No, he didn't tweeted about "making sure" of anything. Elon tweeted "I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning" which is no sense a credible source for what he actually asked SpaceXAI team to do, or if they are doing it, or what they were doing before yesterday. Elon has an extremely long and thorough track record of lying. https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2081844165881594362 https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2081844165881594362
      - ComputerPerson 2mo ago
        Sure, I'm ambivalent to his veracity. The problem remains either way. Small operations around the globe are debinding rare/unique books. I'm involved with an organization considering (not strongly) that exactly.
  - xyzzy123 2mo ago
    Hi, shredding the book is to reduce potential legal liability of format shifting - if you shred the book after scanning, the theory is you are not increasing the number of copies. This has come up as a factor in legal rulings. The legality of format shifting is still murky though, and the legality of training on the work are a separate question.
Aurornis 2mo ago
> Perhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on public research There is some excellent publicly-funded research in there, but pivotal papers like Attention Is All You Need and the numerous pivotal OpenAI publications were privately funded. OpenAI is at the top of the chart in the study. I think you're bringing some assumptions into this conversation that aren't supported by the evidence.
- KoolKat23 2mo ago
  Sorry I mean published i.e. available to the public.
  - Aurornis 2mo ago
    I was also referring to published papers available to the public. Like I said, I think you're bringing some assumptions to this conversation that aren't based on the how the industry came about.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- anon373839 2mo ago
  > OpenAI is at the top of the chart in the study. A distinction should be made between the old nonprofit OpenAI and the current organization. They don't publish technical research anymore.
- thinkzilla 2mo ago
  The Attention Is All You Need paper deserves a lot of credit, but it also builds on other ideas. Earlier versions of attention were introduced in 2014 papers from (not U.S.) universities.
fultonn 2mo ago
> Perhaps I'm imagining it You are not. A disproportionate amount of value in the computing industry was created by <strike>geniuses</strike> decently smart people who worked together and who decided to just tell people how to do things instead of trying to capture the value of being the first person to figure out how to do those things. This observation pre-dates the current wave of AI hype by a half century or so. > driven by greed I can only speak for myself. For me it's exactly the opposite. If I want to explain how something works, I can just... do that. If I want to share an artifact demonstrating how to solve a particular type of problem, I can just... do that. If I want to mentor/teach, I can just... do that. Doing those things within the confines of Academia Approved Institutions is exhausting and distracting. To wit, and the actual point of this post: the term "Publishing Research" in this article doesn't mean "post it on a .html page and share the source code". It means engaging in a very specific and peculiar and extremely political modality of communication. And it really only makes sense to do that specific and peculiar and political thing you're at a stage in your professional/personal development where you need to play that particular prestige game. (Which there's nothing wrong with, but it is a deeply cargo culted version of the actual scientific process.)
- blackqueeriroh 2mo ago
  Let me help rewrite your first paragraph: * A disproportionate amount of value in the computing industry was created by g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶e̶s̶ decently smart people who worked together to do things that seemed impossible and who decided to just tell people how to do things instead of trying to capture the value of being the first person to figure out how to do those things.*
  - fultonn 2mo ago
    thx for notes; no complaints on my end. edit: edited.
janalsncm 2mo ago
Some companies are sharing their research. Mostly not the American ones Example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653 https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653 Exceptions to some like Deepmind, Nvidia, and Thinking Machines
83642736392 2mo ago
[dead]
- KoolKat23 2mo ago
  Unfortunately. We live in a increasingly complex world and the truth gets muddled. In the past if your local store does something unethical, it would be easy to determine this, discuss and vote with your wallet. With increasingly large and complicated businesses this is no longer easy to determine and communicate. Obviously this can be abused with hypocritical things like virtue signalling, but the primary purpose is to encourage businesses to do better. There are many stakeholders.

cute_boi 2mo ago

Forget publishing, companies like misanthropic are buying rare books and destroying it. [1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

drivebyhooting 2mo ago
What do you mean?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- KolmogorovComp 2mo ago
  To scan them, they usually have to resort breaking them into individual pages.
- taude 2mo ago
  they're refering to this: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-de...
- wonnage 2mo ago
  https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli... The scanning process destroys the book.
  - jazzyjackson 2mo ago
    Note it doesn't have to, it's just faster to. Internet Archive scans their books one page at a time keeping the book intact and stored in a warehouse.
    - usef- 2mo ago
      They do: the judge in the Anthropic case said that destroying them means that the text is being transferred, and so therefore can be fair use. > "The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other." (I believe the reasoning is that the author is not being financially disadvantaged by more copies of their book existing). So the current law prefers them to destroy.
      - golem14 2mo ago
        Rare books seldom are under copyright and that’s not a concern then.
        usef- 2mo ago
        Is that easy to tell for each book, though? I usually hear that it's extremely hard to track down the copyright owners for many older things. That's the reason the film/video industry often gives for not digitising the backlog online, and I would expect their volume to be much easier to handle than the book industry.
        golem14 2mo ago
        It’s not easy, but there are good heuristics. If it fetches 10s of thousands at an auction, like an original Gutenberg bible or something, don’t destroy. If it’s my thesis from high school, destroying while making a copy is ok. It’s really not important to come with a totally bulletproof 100% accurate rule here.
jsphweid 2mo ago
When they do this, are they buying a single copy of say Book A and destroying a single Book A copy? Or are they buying every copy they can find of Book A and destroying all of them?
- ComputerPerson 2mo ago
  Elon recently (2d) tweeted about making sure they preserve rare books and "scan them the hard way". That tweet launched a cultural wave of opposition regarding the debinding of rare books. The discussion has been around, but it's flared significantly recently. Not sure if that's what the person you're responding to is specifically inflamed about. Regardless, old/rare books are certainly being acquired and destroyed.
  - gowld 2mo ago
    No, he didn't tweeted about "making sure" of anything. Elon tweeted "I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning" which is no sense a credible source for what he actually asked SpaceXAI team to do, or if they are doing it, or what they were doing before yesterday. Elon has an extremely long and thorough track record of lying. https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2081844165881594362 https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2081844165881594362
    - ComputerPerson 2mo ago
      Sure, I'm ambivalent to his veracity. The problem remains either way. Small operations around the globe are debinding rare/unique books. I'm involved with an organization considering (not strongly) that exactly.
- xyzzy123 2mo ago
  Hi, shredding the book is to reduce potential legal liability of format shifting - if you shred the book after scanning, the theory is you are not increasing the number of copies. This has come up as a factor in legal rulings. The legality of format shifting is still murky though, and the legality of training on the work are a separate question.

Aurornis 2mo ago

> Perhaps I'm imagining it but the entire industry was build on public research There is some excellent publicly-funded research in there, but pivotal papers like Attention Is All You Need and the numerous pivotal OpenAI publications were privately funded. OpenAI is at the top of the chart in the study. I think you're bringing some assumptions into this conversation that aren't supported by the evidence.

KoolKat23 2mo ago
Sorry I mean published i.e. available to the public.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  I was also referring to published papers available to the public. Like I said, I think you're bringing some assumptions to this conversation that aren't based on the how the industry came about.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
anon373839 2mo ago
> OpenAI is at the top of the chart in the study. A distinction should be made between the old nonprofit OpenAI and the current organization. They don't publish technical research anymore.
thinkzilla 2mo ago
The Attention Is All You Need paper deserves a lot of credit, but it also builds on other ideas. Earlier versions of attention were introduced in 2014 papers from (not U.S.) universities.

fultonn 2mo ago

> Perhaps I'm imagining it You are not. A disproportionate amount of value in the computing industry was created by <strike>geniuses</strike> decently smart people who worked together and who decided to just tell people how to do things instead of trying to capture the value of being the first person to figure out how to do those things. This observation pre-dates the current wave of AI hype by a half century or so. > driven by greed I can only speak for myself. For me it's exactly the opposite. If I want to explain how something works, I can just... do that. If I want to share an artifact demonstrating how to solve a particular type of problem, I can just... do that. If I want to mentor/teach, I can just... do that. Doing those things within the confines of Academia Approved Institutions is exhausting and distracting. To wit, and the actual point of this post: the term "Publishing Research" in this article doesn't mean "post it on a .html page and share the source code". It means engaging in a very specific and peculiar and extremely political modality of communication. And it really only makes sense to do that specific and peculiar and political thing you're at a stage in your professional/personal development where you need to play that particular prestige game. (Which there's nothing wrong with, but it is a deeply cargo culted version of the actual scientific process.)

blackqueeriroh 2mo ago
Let me help rewrite your first paragraph: * A disproportionate amount of value in the computing industry was created by g̶e̶n̶i̶u̶s̶e̶s̶ decently smart people who worked together to do things that seemed impossible and who decided to just tell people how to do things instead of trying to capture the value of being the first person to figure out how to do those things.*
- fultonn 2mo ago
  thx for notes; no complaints on my end. edit: edited.

janalsncm 2mo ago

Some companies are sharing their research. Mostly not the American ones Example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653 https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653 Exceptions to some like Deepmind, Nvidia, and Thinking Machines

83642736392 2mo ago

[dead]

KoolKat23 2mo ago
Unfortunately. We live in a increasingly complex world and the truth gets muddled. In the past if your local store does something unethical, it would be easy to determine this, discuss and vote with your wallet. With increasingly large and complicated businesses this is no longer easy to determine and communicate. Obviously this can be abused with hypocritical things like virtue signalling, but the primary purpose is to encourage businesses to do better. There are many stakeholders.