New York Times & Amazon AI Deal

So, get this. The New York Times, yeah, THAT New York Times, is teaming up with Amazon. Like, they're letting Amazon use their articles for stuff like Alexa. It's a pretty big deal cause it's the first time the Times has done a licensing thing specifically for AI.

This multi-year agreement means Amazon can use news stories from The Times, and even content from their cooking site, NYT Cooking, and that sports site, The Athletic. The Times spilled the beans about it on Thursday, but they didn't say how much money is changing hands. They did say that Amazon will show quick summaries and little bits of Times content in their products, like Alexa, and also use it to train their AI brains.

This whole thing is happening because AI companies are kinda struggling to make their big language models better. They've used up all the easy info out there, you know? A bunch of them, including the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, are even getting sued because of how they used data. Remember last year? The Times actually sued Microsoft and OpenAI, saying they ripped off millions of their articles without asking to train their chatbots. The Times even spent like $4.4 million on lawyer fees in the first few months of this year because of that lawsuit.

Speaking of OpenAI, the guy in charge, Sam Altman, said in 2023 they were looking for partners to get access to public and private info to train their AI models. And they've been busy! They've already made deals with the Financial Times, the company that owns Business Insider, France's Le Monde, Spain's Prisa Media, and Time magazine. Reuters also licensed their articles to Meta Platforms in 2024. Kind of a trend, huh?

An analyst named Max Willens from Emarketer thinks this deal with Amazon is cool because it's a good way for the Times to get in front of people who aren't subscribers yet. The Times has been doing pretty well lately, tbh. They just won four Pulitzer Prizes and got more digital subscribers than they thought they would in the first few months of the year. Selling their bundle deals and having a lot of news happening probably helped get more people reading.