Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI

曾以卖书起家的亚马逊，如今正为了训练 AI 而销毁珍稀书籍

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.

据 404 Media 报道，亚马逊正在大量收购珍稀书籍，切掉书脊并进行扫描，以用于人工智能训练。该媒体曾在一本珍稀书籍中放置了追踪器，最终发现它被送往了亚马逊位于拉斯维加斯的一处设施。该设施代号为 VGT3，其标志是一只爪子里抓着一本书的恐龙。

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

亚马逊在给 404 Media 的声明中表示，公司“通过商业渠道购买书籍，旨在改善客户使用的产品和服务。”

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.

像亚马逊这样的公司需要海量的文本来训练其大语言模型（LLM），而这些模型已经摄取了互联网上所有可用的内容（在 Anthropic 的案例中，甚至还包括非法盗版的书籍）。珍稀书籍，尤其是那些绝版或在互联网上无法找到的书籍，为它们提供了梦寐以求的全新训练数据来源。

These texts are especially valuable since there’s no chance that anything published before 2022 was written by an LLM. 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.

这些文本之所以尤为珍贵，是因为在 2022 年之前出版的任何内容都不可能是由大语言模型生成的。当大语言模型使用 AI 生成的文本进行训练时，它们会面临“模型崩溃”的风险——即在摄入过多 AI 生成的内容后，模型输出的质量会发生退化。