New York Times Teams Up with Amazon for AI Content Deal

Okay, so get this. The New York Times, you know, the big newspaper, is now letting Amazon use their stuff for AI things like Alexa. This is the first time they've done a deal like this for AI, which is kinda a big deal. The agreement is for a few years, and Amazon gets to use articles from the Times, plus stuff from their cooking site and that sports site, The Athletic. They didn't say how much money is involved, though, which is a bit meh, tbh.

What will Amazon do with it? Well, the Times said Amazon will show quick summaries and parts of Times articles in things like Alexa. They'll also use it to train their own AI models. It seems like these AI companies are having a tough time teaching their AI stuff after using up all the easy information online. Lots of them, even the one that owns ChatGPT, are getting sued for using data. Remember last year when The Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI? They said those companies used tons of their articles without asking to train their chatbots. The Times even had to pay like, $4.4 million in legal costs for that lawsuit in just the first few months of the year. Ouch.

Other places are doing similar deals too. OpenAI has already made agreements with the Financial Times, Business Insider's owner, some French and Spanish news places, and Time magazine. Even Reuters, another news company, did a deal with Meta (the Facebook people) in 2024. So, it's definitely a trend.

One analyst, Max Willens, thinks this deal with Amazon is cool though. He said it could be a good way for the Times to get their name out there to people who don't already subscribe. The Times has been doing pretty well lately, anyway. They just won four Pulitzer Prizes, which is a huge achievement. And they got more online subscribers than they thought they would earlier this year. I guess all their bundled offers and the busy news cycle are helping them out. Idk, what do you think about news companies doing deals like this with AI giants?