Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles last week

What I learned:

• Anthropic, parent company to Claude AI, settled a lawsuit for $1.5 billion this week (source). A group of authors accused the company of copyright infringement arising from downloading millions of pirated books and training their models with this pirated content. This is a huge settlement in monetary terms, and it could also be a precedent-setting settlement with respect to using book content for training models. Claude is paying about $3,000 per book for each of the 500,000 books covered in the class action lawsuit. That’s pretty expensive relative to the ~$8 that I pay for books (used, of course). It must also destroy the pirated books it downloaded. The good news is that their revenue run-rate went from $1 billion at the start of this year to over $5 billion as of last month and they just raised $13 billion from investors at a $183 billion valuation (source). I want to understand this better and will be digging into the specifics of this and possibly other related cases. This case could have a material impact on LLMs’ ability to use copyrighted book content legally.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.