Do you know that you can read and download Alice in Wonderland for free online? Maybe you have heard about Project Gutenberg before, an online platform that offers over 70,000 books whose intellectual property rights have expired. On Project Gutenberg, you can read El Quijote in Spanish or Kant’s Kritik der Reiner Vernuft (Critique of Pure Reason) in German. It also offers works in many languages like Italian, French, Chinese, Portuguese.
In our last newsletter, we spoke about empathy.ai as an infrastructure based on Private LLMs. We explained the differences between a private and a public LLM, and how a Private one can better follow the principles of AI ethics:
- A PrivateLLM is trained on contextualised information rather than vast amounts of data; it operates within the boundaries of a specific organisation, significantly reducing some of the ethical risks associated with LLMs.
- Empathy.ai is built on open-source models like DeepSeek R1 and runs on its own, self-hosted, self-operated GPU infrastructure, independent of commercial clouds.
In this work, we also discussed the technical details of the infrastructure to explain how empathy.ai is ethical by design. You might want to refresh your mind by reading it here 👈
Today, we are focusing on Project Gutenberg because, very excitingly, empathy.ai is building on its legacy! With a little research, we have learned that Project Gutenberg has a strong community, including those who volunteer to proofread. This is why it is very important for us to communicate how we at the ECA, empathy.ai and Project Gutenberg share values, and why we are big admirers of Project Gutenberg's mission.
Why is empathy.ai building on Project Gutenberg?
The reason why empathy.ai operates on the bases of open-source models is because we believe in the democratization of knowledge, which is also why the contextualised models that empathy.ai has trained are available on Hugging Face. Additionally, being open-source, means that we believe in a transparent context-of-thought process within the model; this follows the principles of AI ethics.
Project Gutenberg’s mission is also to democratise knowledge, as it follows on the idea that books should be “open-source” too, free to access and free to download! While also respecting the intellectual property rights of authors. Empathy.ai wants to build on this legacy by bridging the gap between what is publicly available and what is not. But how?
Empathy.ai has contextualised the open-source model of Qwen3-0.6B to the Project Gutenberg catalogue, making it Private, and, as promised, the model is available to download on Hugging Face:
This means that there is an AI contextualised to Project Gutenberg that can help you within the catalogue, but is not trained on external data, nor will it train the LLM on the data from your queries.
Why does Alice follow the rabbit?
Take this example, Alice in Wonderland is available on Project Gutenberg, I want to ask the LLM specific questions about the book.
I curiously ask : "Why does Alice in Wonderland follow the rabbit?"
And I get the following response:
"In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows the White Rabbit because she is curious and intrigued by his peculiar behavior. The Rabbit, dressed in a waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch, seems important and in a hurry, which sparks Alice's curiosity. This act of following the Rabbit leads Alic down a rabbit hole and into the fantastical world of Wonderland, where she encounters a series of strange and wonderful creatures. The Rabbit's urgency and Alice's curiosity serve as a catalyst for the adventures that unfold.
Here are some resources to help you explore Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:"
Now, if I want to know how the LLM got to that response, I can click the "Empathising" button, and the LLM will explain to me the chain of thought process:
Providing a chain of thought process is a way of directly supporting key ethical AI principles like transparency, interpretability, accountability and trust.
How does empathy.ai bridge the gap between works whose intellectual property has expired and those whose properties have not yet expired?
Project Gutenberg follows US intellectual property law only featuring works from authors whose property rights have expired. Empathy.ai seeks to build on this legacy of democratising knowledge while, like Project Gutenberg, protecting intellectual property rights. To further this goal, empathy.ai has also integrated the catalogue of local bookstores from MotiveMarket, including shops like Casa del Libro.
If you are not familiar with MotiveMarket.com yet, it is a platform developed by Empathy.co to promote local retail stores by increasing their visibility, without charging fees or commissions to the store. Users can search for a products on a platform that exclusively displays local stores. Empathy.ai is building on the Project Gutenberg legacy by integrating an AI that is ethical in its design which supports the purpose of the Project while also supporting local commerce, this is not a coincidence 😉.
Therefore, If I want to search for a book like the Hunger Games, that is not available in Project Gutenberg:
I can ask the Project Gutenberg, empathy.ai experienc
As you can see, it offers books from local stores and when clicking on a specific source it will directly take you to the store that sells the book, highlighting the importance of giving visibility to the local store, not just the platform.
Putting Ethics first
Integrating empathy.ai's model to the public domain catalogue of Project Gutenberg is a step towards ethical technology and an open knowledge. Empathy's mission of combining a transparent, advanced AI with a mission driven digital library puts forward news standards for responsible AI development.
Putting together an ethically driven LLM with an admirable project like Project Gutenberg to support sustainable and ethical commerce demonstrates how AI can be harnessed to amplify human values. Protecting privacy, promoting fairness, and fostering a more inclusive and digital ecosystem.
We encourage you to check out this project and give us any feedback as we continue to better it, always ethically. 😄
https://projectgutenberg.generativeai.empathy.ai/