Inside an Amazon Warehouse Where Books Are Guillotined for AI Training
An insider details how Amazon slices the spines off new, used, and rare books at a Nevada facility to feed high-speed scanners for language models.
An interview published by 404Media offers a rare ground-level look at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, Nevada, where books are systematically unpacked, stripped of their bindings, and scanned to train artificial intelligence models.
According to a worker at the VGT3 warehouse, operations involve processing everything from brand-new titles and library clearances to foreign-language volumes and government documents. Workers sort the material into plastic bins before moving them to workstations equipped with mechanical guillotine blades. An operator places a book inside, shields their fingers, presses a button to slice off the spine, and separates the pages into loose stacks.
High-speed scanners—numbering between 20 and 25 and resembling money-counters—then flip through the pages rapidly while software captures the data. The process matches earlier reporting by 404Media, which tracked a rare book to the same complex using an Apple AirTag. At the time, Amazon stated that it acquires books through commercial channels to improve customer products and services.
Source: habr
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