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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have more content about what makes Books3 so special relative to Bibliotik? Was it processed somehow, or just compiled into a single file?

I feel like I’m missing something from this and all of the other articles about Books3. It sounds like he downloaded all of the books from a book piracy site then rehosted them with the “Books3” name. Surely there must be more to the story? Or is the story simply that a professor hosted pirated content under his own name under the guise of AI training?

This is the kind of effort that could have been done anonymously, just as all of the pirated books had already been uploaded and hosted anonymously. I’m not sure why he expected any different outcome by re-pirating everything under his own name.

The journalists seem to be loving it, though. All of the tech journals have an article about this guy.

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>It sounds like he downloaded all of the books from a book piracy site then rehosted them with the “Books3” name.

>Surely there must be more to the story?

I asked him a while ago about this. The story is as simple as it sounds:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36194455

> Does anyone have more content about what makes Books3 so special relative to Bibliotik?

They are essentially the same content (that is, the documentation for the copy of books3 seoarately hosted in huggingface says that it is all of Bibliotik in plaintext form, presumably as of a particular point in time.)

> This is the kind of effort that could have been done anonymously

Sure, its something each group training an AI could do independently at greater aggregate cost until someone succeeds in taking the original source down, but not only would that be costlier, but it in would involve less transparency and comparability across model architecture, or at least required the transparent, comparable trained version to be different from the full version.

> Sure, its something each group training an AI could do independently at greater aggregate cost until someone succeeds in taking the original source down, but not only would that be costlier, but it in would involve less transparency and comparability across model architecture, or at least required the transparent, comparable trained version to be different from the full version.

I meant he could have uploaded it under a pseudonym rather than broadcasting to the world that he was the one doing the uploading.

So his contribution consisted of putting Bibliotik into plaintext format? Or is there more to it?

Correct. It was a hard problem. Thankfully not so hard as to be impossible though.

How dare you profane the contributions of a literal god of AI!

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