You can tell the llm companies aren’t serious about supporting their products long-term because these kinds of projects still rely on volunteers. If Anthropic or OpenAI or Google or whoever was serious about building better LLMs, they’d have paid employees digitizing every written word in every corpus on earth to increase the size of the training set.

I don't even think it's that: Given that cursive and handwriting as a general mode of commuication is all-but extinct - and for years hasn't been taught in elementary schools, (thankfully that is changing, albeit slowly) there aren't enough people that work in IT that grew up having to hand write papers to get traction on these projects.

Hand writing papers was hell. When I was a child I thought I hated writing. It turned out I just hated handwriting. Getting a word processor was a godsend and improved not only my literacy, but also my academic performance. I believe there was a short time I was being considered for special need classes not because of shortcomings in my intellectual abilities but rather the ability to transcribe those ideas to a page. Also having that computer in the early 1980s also lead to my career in IT.

(thankfully that is changing, albeit slowly)

Can I ask what benefit you see in longhand cursive being taught in schools? What subject being taught today would you take time from to put toward cursive education?

At the most basic, it's hand/eye coordination.

Talk to any educator that's been teaching grade school children for a few decades. There's a definite lack of finer motor control in children that haven't been taught to write in cursive. That is one of the reasons that I keep seeing as an example when it's brought up for consideration to be reinstated. (this is ancillary to the whole skilled craftsman/labor pivot that is finally being addressed!) Hand skills do make a difference.

NGL, my husband can't write in cursive and his printing and other finer motor skills are shit. He cooks and I fix the cars and the electronics and help him with whatever projects that require nimble dexterity. I also have a bang up easy to read handwriting script AND can print like an engineer or draftsman. Both my parents made sure I could write cursive and print legibly. Mercilessly so..

I'm a product of the cursive handwriting system in school. It didn't do anything to improve my handwriting in script or print.