“We're not making infinite copies,” clarified the co-founder, when asked whether the company had, in fact, made infinite copies.
Pictured: nothing. The Tupperware container was, per company request, not identified by brand.
AUSTIN, TX—Engineers at three-person AI startup Loomwork confirmed Thursday that their entire training data pipeline consists of a single legally purchased paperback copy of a 2019 literary novel, which the company has been quietly “lending out” to six different in-house models on a rotating basis, a practice one engineer described as “basically a library card, if the library only had one book and the librarian was extremely nervous.”
“We bought it fair and square,” said co-founder Ashwin Reddy, gesturing at a slightly dog-eared copy of the novel sitting in what the company calls “the vault,” which is, physically, a Tupperware container on a shelf above the office microwave. “Ownership isn’t really in question. We’re the proud owners of one book. What we do with it after that is, I think, a gray area that our lawyer described as ‘fine, probably, don’t ask me again.’”
According to internal documents, the novel is “checked out” to Model A for roughly four hours of training, then “returned” to the shelf, at which point Model B checks it out, followed by Models C through F over the course of a single business day, a rotation the company’s engineering lead, Priya Vashisht, compared favorably to a library system, “except nobody has to wait, and also every model keeps it forever, technically, in a different sense.”
“People hear ‘six models’ and they think we bought six books,” Vashisht said. “We didn’t buy six books. That would be insane. That would be, like, sixty dollars.”
The novel’s author, reached for comment, said she was unaware her book had been “lent out” to anything, and had assumed, based on her royalty statement, that exactly one person had purchased it in the last fiscal quarter.
“I want to be clear, I’m flattered on some level,” the author said. “Six models is more readers than my last two book clubs combined. I would just like to know if I’m getting six library late fees or one, and whether either of those converts to money.”
Loomwork has since expanded the practice into what it internally calls “reserve lending,” under which the same book is technically checked out to two models simultaneously, a capability Reddy attributes to “just, you know, not physically moving the book, and instead copying the words in it, which is different, legally, we’ve been told, by someone.”
Industry analysts note the approach mirrors, almost exactly, a discredited banking practice in which an institution lends out more of an asset than it actually possesses, the key difference being that a bank run ends with angry depositors in a lobby, whereas this ends with a slightly confused novelist getting a Google Alert for her own sentences.
“We’re making one copy, six times, continuously, forever. There’s a difference. I could explain it, but I think it’s more of a vibe.”
“We’re not making infinite copies,” Reddy clarified, when asked whether the company had, in fact, made infinite copies. “We’re making one copy, six times, continuously, forever. There’s a difference. I could explain it, but I think it’s more of a vibe.”
At press time, Loomwork had announced plans to acquire a second book, citing user feedback that all six of its models had begun, independently, to sound “a little too much like one specific guy’s divorce.”