From the article, they took steps to avoid using their IP addresses. Individuals doing the same using a VPN are pretty much immune from any legal issues.
IME companies take copyright way more seriously than individuals. e.g. my last 2 jobs have had scanners to ensure we're not accidentally pulling in GPL code to our products, and one of those was a startup. I'd be surprised if corporate security software weren't looking for torrent clients and if you wouldn't get fired for torrenting on corporate machines or networks at most companies. Meanwhile the same people setting those security policies have a 100TB array at home with fully automated pirating setups. They very much don't care personally, but it's a huge business risk.
In high school/university in the 00s, everyone casually pirated things. In college people passed around a USB drive with all of the books needed for our degree program. People in the dorms traded music collections with 10s of thousands of songs. Tellingly, Apple advertised that iPods could store 10,000 songs, which approximately zero people could afford to buy legitimately. If anything, the consequences for piracy have gone down since then, but streaming is convenient enough and phone storage/UX is hobbled enough that people pay.
In any case, I think the other poster is right that companies flouting copyright law is a good thing. It stops us from pretending that it's helpful for the little guy, making it easier to argue for abolition or vastly reducing the length. That they did it to build an open model is even better: it shows directly the kinds of benefits copyright is taking from us. We should be looking to scan every book out there to build better training sets (and better indexed search into scholastic datasets; at this point all of Anna's Archive only costs a little over $11k in raw storage, which puts it into "affordable as an upper middle class home library" territory. In another few years, it may be affordable to nearly everyone. Better ML models could help here with better compression as well), but copyright law restricts use of works dating back to a time before electrification was widespread. Obviously they're an evil company in general, but llama was an actual good deed from them.
