3:00 AM. Another one of those nights where my brain decided sleep was overrated. After my usual nocturnal walk through the streets of a remote Scottish town—where even a fox observed me with that “humans are weird” look—I sat back down at my server. Just a quick scan of my RSS feeds, I told myself, then I can start work. When...

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It's distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It's the world's first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

The news came from Anna's Archive—the world's largest pirate library—which had just scraped Spotify's entire catalog. Not just metadata, but also the audio files. 86 million tracks, 300 terabytes. I stopped to reread those numbers, then thought: holy shit, how big is this thing?

When the world woke up astonished in November 2022 to this “magical” chatbot, few realized that this magic was the result of decades of research. The history of artificial intelligence begins in 1943, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts proposed the first mathematical model of an artificial neuron. In 1956, at the Dartmouth Conference, John McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” and the discipline was officially born.

The '60s and '70s were characterized by excessive optimism: people thought strong AI was just around the corner. Two “AI winters” followed – periods when funding disappeared and research slowed – because promises weren't materializing. But some continued working in the shadows. Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio – those we now call the “godfathers of deep learning” – continued their studies on neural networks when no one believed in them anymore.