Data hoarder turns Epstein archive into AI-powered search tool

With the controversy surrounding the late Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier who had been serving a jail sentence for sexually abusing minors when he died, still capturing the world’s attention, a data hoarder on Reddit has made it searchable by deploying artificial intelligence (AI).

As it happens, an open-source project has created a searchable database of over 8,100 files about Epstein published by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the United States House of Representatives in early September, allowing users to query and explore them via AI-powered search.

Specifically, the project is called Epstein Archive, and its creator, a Reddit user u/nicko170, originally released it on GitHub to facilitate easier and free navigation of an otherwise messy data dump, including transcriptions, using a self-hosted installation of Llama 4 Maverick VLM, “on a very big server.”

Additionally, this data hoarder has also mirrored the project as a torrent file that users can magnet from the Reddit post directly, in case someone takes down the original. Users can search it to find files mentioning particular people, organizations, locations, and dates among 8,175 processed items.

Making sense of a messy Google Drive folder

As a reminder, the House Oversight Committee released over 33,200 pages worth of partial and redacted files as part of its investigation into Epstein, which it subpoenaed from the Justice Department, organized in a chaotic and confusing way in a Google Drive folder as .jpg and .tif images of documents, making it extremely difficult to navigate.

According to u/nicko170, the AI model used to create the searchable database “processes and tries to restore documents into a full document from the mixed pages – some have errored, but will capture them and come back to fix,” adding they were:

“Not here to make a buck, just hoping to collate and sort through all these files in an efficient way for everyone.”

Per the project’s GitHub page:

Speaking of AI, despite its overwhelming popularity, it appears that AI browsing isn’t as common as one would think, taking up only about 1% of online activity, and a recent study has found that it’s mostly people with dark personality traits (a.k.a. scoring high in the ‘Dark Triad’) who do it on a regular basis.