New York Times Partners with Amazon for AI Content Deal
So, get this: The New York Times, you know, the big newspaper, is now letting Amazon use its stuff for things like Alexa. Like, their articles and everything. This is the first time they've done a deal like this for that generative AI tech. Pretty wild, right?
They said this deal goes on for a few years. Amazon gets to use the news stories from The Times, plus the recipes from NYT Cooking and even the sports stuff from The Athletic website. They didn't say how much money is changing hands though. The Times folks mentioned that Amazon will show quick little summaries and bits of their content in things like Alexa, and also use it to train Amazon's own AI models. So, basically, Amazon is getting a bunch of training data.
This whole thing is happening because these AI companies are having a tough time making their AI models better. They've used up all the easy-to-find information out there, you know? A lot of them, including the company that made ChatGPT, are also getting sued because people are saying they used data without permission. Actually, The Times even sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year, saying they used tons of their articles without asking to train their chatbots. The Times even said they spent about $4.4 million on legal costs for that lawsuit in just the first three months of the year. Ouch.
The guy in charge of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said last year they were trying to partner up with people to get access to different kinds of data sets for training their AI. Since then, they've made deals with other news places too, like the Financial Times, Business Insider's owner Axel Springer, some places in France and Spain called Le Monde and Prisa Media, and even Time magazine. Reuters, another big news place, also made a deal with Meta Platforms in 2024 to let them use their articles for their AI chatbot.
One expert, Max Willens from Emarketer, said that this deal with Amazon is a cool way for The Times to get in front of people who don't subscribe yet. Maybe they'll see the summaries and think, hey, I want to read the whole thing. The Times has been doing pretty well lately too. They just won four big awards called Pulitzer Prizes and got more online subscribers than they thought they would in the first part of the year. They said their bundled deals and all the news happening helped bring in more readers. It's like, when there's a lot going on, people want to know about it!
