Amazon, once an online bookseller, is destroying rare books to train AI models

Rare books in LLM training

Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever’s available online.

Amazon’s rare-book pipeline

Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media, which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. The facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws.

Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it “purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.”

Why rare books are needed

Companies like Amazon need unfathomably large amounts of text to train their LLMs, which have already ingested what they can from the internet (and, in Anthropic’s case, illegally pirated books).

Rare books, especially ones that are out of print or impossible to find on the internet, offer a new source of coveted training data. These texts are especially valuable since there’s no chance that anything published before 2022 was written by an LLM.

The model collapse risk

When LLMs train on AI-generated text, they risk “model collapse,” which can occur when the quality of an LLM’s outputs degrade after ingesting too much AI-generated text.