Here is your Forbes Daily Briefing Bonus Story of the Week.

Today on Forbes, The Library of Congress is a training data playground for AI companies.

Black and white portraits of Rosa Parks, Letters Penne, companies. known to be one of the last handwritten Bibles in Europe.

These are among the 180 million items,

including books, manuscripts, maps, and audio recordings,

housed within the Library of Congress.

Every year hundreds of thousands of visitors walked through the library's high-ceilinged

pillared halls, passing beneath Renaissance-style domes embellished with murals and mosaics.

But of late, the more than 200 year old library has attracted a new type of patron.

AI companies that are eager to access the library's digital archives,

and the 185 pedabytes of data stored within it,

to develop and train their most advanced AI models.

For reference, one pedibite is equal to 1,000 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes.

Judith Conklin, chief information officer at the Library of Congress told Forbes, quote,

we know that we have a large amount of digital material

that large language model companies are very interested in.

It's extraordinarily popular.

The upsurge and interest in the library's data is also reflected in the numbers.

The Congress.gov website, which is managed by the Library of Congress and hosts data about

bills, statutes, and laws gets anywhere between 20 million

to 40 million monthly hits on its API, an interface that allows programmers to download

the library's data in a machine readable format.

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