[fjdjshsh]

>The strike by Alibaba is described as a "distillation" effort, which Anthropic has said involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.

Claude used TB of content without permission to train their model and it was ok for them. Now someone else uses the output of a Claude model to train model and they cry foul.

[cubefox]

It was not okay for them, they had to pay one billion dollars.

[callmeal]

>It was not okay for them, they had to pay one billion dollars.

Essentially peanuts compared to what they would have to pay to obtain the rights of everything they pirated.

[cubefox]

No. It's actually way more than what they would have paid if they legally obtained those books. The 1.5 billion dollars amount to $3000 per book.

[internet_points]

Legally obtaining a book for reading it yourself is different from legally obtaining a book for copying and republishing/reselling. If I buy a book for $5 at a sale I can read it myself or even sell it for $10 on craigslist, but I can't scan it and make a million copies and sell each of those.

[cubefox]

They aren't republishing or reselling. In fact, they buy huge amounts of books and then destroy them, which is better for the rights holders than to resell them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

[gf000]

Since whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way.

Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model?

[scotty79]

That's terrifying waste of real world resouces for no other purpose than satisfying the letter i of the absurd rent-seeking-enabling laws.

[gmerc]

No https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6449179

[axus]

Not reselling? What am I paying them for then?

[m4rtink]

Anyone who destroys a book on purpose is a criminal.

[slopinthebag]

> obtain the rights of everything they pirated

They didn't just pirate those books...

[cubefox]

If we assume on average $20 per legally obtained book, 1.5 billion dollars are enough for 75 million books. That's approximately every non-fiction book in existence.

[slopinthebag]

Why would we assume $20 a book? Many books retail for more, and a licence to use the book for commercial purposes is more than retail.

[p_j_w]

That’s a pittance compared to their revenue.