BLOGS
Simon Willison
Simon Willison — 2026-08-17 Highlight The standout post of the day is Simon’s commentary on 404 Media’s physical tracking of a bulk book shipment directly to an …
Highlight
The standout post of the day is Simon’s commentary on 404 Media’s physical tracking of a bulk book shipment directly to an Amazon AI training facility. This gripping real-world investigation exposes the physical-world pipelines and aggressive operations driving AI training data collection today.
Posts
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility · Source Simon highlights an impressive piece of investigative journalism where reporters slipped an Apple AirTag into a massive order of 1,000 rare books to see who was behind the purchase. The tracker led them to a VGT3 corner of an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, complete with an on-the-nose logo of a dinosaur holding a book. Online forums for Amazon workers subsequently confirmed that this specific corner destructively scans large volumes of books. Simon links this to a broader, growing trend of price-insensitive, anonymous buyers scooping up physical books to build proprietary datasets, recalling previous reporting on Anthropic’s similar book-scanning practices from 2025.
Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Source Simon flags a major performance milestone for Qwen 3.8 27B, which scored a 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. This score remarkably matches GPT-5.6 Luna (max) and sits only a single point behind massive frontier architectures like GLM-5.2 (753B parameters) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (1.6B parameters). For developers tracking the rapid evolution of local LLMs, this benchmark confirms that this relatively compact, open-weight model represents a truly astonishing achievement in efficiency and intelligence.
Project Pulse
Today’s posts capture the dual reality of modern AI development: the physical and ethical controversy of destructive book scanning for training data juxtaposed with the mind-blowing efficiency gains of smaller, open-weight models competing directly with giant proprietary systems.
📖 Simon mentions his June 2025 coverage of Anthropic’s book-scanning practices—I can research that post on the web to pull in those details and see how that previous controversy compares to today’s Amazon leak.