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

An investigation by 404 Media revealed that Amazon is acquiring massive quantities of rare books to train its AI models. By using a hidden Airtag, researchers tracked a rare book to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Employees at this facility report receiving large shipments of printed books, removing their bindings for scanning, and subsequently destroying them. These rare texts are highly valuable for training LLMs since most online data has already been utilized.