Zuckerberg appeared to be aware that Meta trained its AI on a pirated library
Now, under a court order from Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the records of those previously confidential internal dialogues have been unsealed, and appear to confirm Zuckerberg’s decision to greenlight the transfer of pirated, copyrighted LibGen data to improve Llama — despite concerns about a backlash. In an email to Joelle Pineau, vice president of AI research at Meta, Sony Theakanath, director of product management, wrote, “After a prior escalation to MZ [Mark Zuckerberg], GenAI has been approved to use LibGen for Llama 3 […] with a number of agreed upon mitigations.” The note observed that including the LibGen material would help them reach certain performance benchmarks, and alluded to industry rumors that other AI companies, including OpenAI and Mistral AI, are “using the library for their models.” In the same email, Theakanath wrote that under no circumstances would Meta publicly disclose its use of LibGen.
