New York Times Teams Up with Amazon for AI Content Deal
So, guess what? The New York Times is teaming up with Amazon! Like, they're letting Amazon use their articles and stuff for AI things, like maybe helping Alexa be smarter? This is a big deal for The Times, their first time doing a deal like this for AI. It's a multi-year thing, so it's happening for a while.
They're letting Amazon use articles from the main New York Times, plus stuff from NYT Cooking and that sports site, The Athletic. They didn't say how much money is changing hands, which, idk, kinda makes you wonder, right?
The Times said this means Amazon can show little bits and summaries of their content in Amazon's products, so maybe on Alexa or other things. And they're also using it to train Amazon's own AI models. Pretty interesting, huh?
This whole thing is happening because AI companies are finding it tough to get enough good info to make their AI better. They've used up all the easy stuff out there. And tbh, a lot of these AI companies are getting sued because people are saying they used their data without permission. Remember how The Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year? They said they used tons of their articles to train their chatbots, which sounded like a real headache for The Times, costing them a good bit of money in the first few months of the year just on dealing with the lawsuit.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, actually said last year they wanted to find partners to get more data to train their AI. Since then, they've made deals with other news places, like the Financial Times, Business Insider's owner Axel Springer, some places in France and Spain, and even Time magazine. And Reuters even licensed their articles to Meta Platforms, you know, the Facebook people, in 2024.
Someone who looks at the market, an analyst named Max Willens, thinks this deal with Amazon is a cool chance for The Times to get in front of people who don't already subscribe. That could be a smart move, right? The Times has been doing pretty well lately, they won some Pulitzer Prizes not too long ago and got more digital subscribers than they thought they would at the start of the year. Their bundled deals seem to be working, and all the news happening out there is definitely getting people to read more.
