text: •**Other Modalities:**Finally, books do not just contain text, they often contain images 
  and captions of those images. As such, they can be an important training source for 
  multi-modal LLMs, which can receive and generate data in media other than text. 
  
  **Lowering Barriers to Entry & Facilitating Competition**
  
  Broad access to books for AI training is critical to ensure powerful AI models are not 
  concentrated in the hands of only a few companies. Access to training data, in general, has 
  been cited as a potential competitive concern 
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   in the AI ﬁeld because of the performance 
  beneﬁts to be gained by training on larger and larger datasets. But this competitive wedge is 
  even more acute when we look speciﬁcally at access to book datasets. 
  
  The largest technology companies building commercial AI models have the resources and 
  capacity to mass digitize books for AI training. Google has scanned 40 million books, many 
  of which came from digitization partnerships they formed with libraries. They may already 
  use some or all of these books to train their AI systems. 
   It’s unclear to what extent other 
  companies already have acquired books for AI training (for instance, whether Amazon’s 
  licenses with publishers or self-published authors may permit such uses); 
  existing 
  
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