New York Times and Amazon Team Up for AI Content Deal
Okay, so check this out. The New York Times and Amazon just made a big deal! The Times is letting Amazon use their news stories and stuff for AI things, like Alexa. Apparently, this is the first time the Times has done a deal like this for AI. It's a multi-year thing, so Amazon gets to use articles from the main Times, plus NYT Cooking and The Athletic. They didn't say how much money is involved though, idk why.
What's cool is that Amazon will show little bits of Times content in their products, like summaries and short pieces on Alexa. They'll also use the content to train their own AI models. Seems like AI companies are having a tough time finding enough info to make their AI better after using up all the easy-to-get stuff. A bunch of them, including the company that makes ChatGPT, are even getting sued because people say they used data without asking. Remember how The Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year for using their articles without permission? Yeah, they even had to pay about $4.4 million in legal fees in the first few months because of that lawsuit. Ouch.
OpenAI actually said last year that they wanted to team up with people to get access to more data. Since then, they've made deals with places like the Financial Times, Business Insider's owner, a French paper called Le Monde, a Spanish one called Prisa Media, and even Time magazine. Reuters also licensed their articles to Meta Platforms recently, just last year. An analyst named Max Willens thinks this deal with Amazon is a great chance for the Times to get new readers who don't already subscribe. Maybe that will help them out?
The Times has been doing pretty well lately. They just won four Pulitzer Prizes, which is a big deal! They also got more digital subscribers than they thought they would in the first part of this year. Their bundled deals and all the news happening right now are helping people want to read more. It makes you wonder, what other cool things will AI and news companies do together in the future?
