New York Times Teams Up with Amazon on AI Content Deal
So, the New York Times, you know, the big newspaper folks, are now letting Amazon use their articles for things like Alexa and other AI products. This is a pretty big deal, their first time doing a licensing thing just for AI stuff.
The agreement goes on for a few years, and it means Amazon can use articles from The Times, plus stuff from their cooking site and The Athletic, which is their sports site. They didn't say how much money is involved, though. The Times said this deal will let Amazon show quick summaries and bits of their content on things like Alexa, and also help train Amazon's AI models.
This all comes at a time when AI companies are really struggling to find enough good data to make their language models better. It seems like they've used up all the easy stuff. Plus, a lot of these companies, even the ones behind ChatGPT like OpenAI, are getting sued because people are saying they used data without permission. Remember how The Times actually sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year? They said those companies used millions of their articles to train those chatbots, which is a big no-no.
The Times even spent like $4.4 million on legal costs for that lawsuit in just one quarter. OpenAI, though, said last year they were looking to work with people to get access to public and private data for training their AI. And they've been busy! They've signed agreements with a bunch of other news places since then, like the Financial Times, Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer, Le Monde in France, Prisa Media in Spain, and even Time magazine. Reuters also licensed their articles to Meta Platforms recently.
An analyst named Max Willens from Emarketer thinks this deal with Amazon is a smart move for The Times. He said it's a good chance to get their name out there to people who don't already subscribe. Stuff like This! The Times has been doing well lately, too. They just won four Pulitzer Prizes, which is a pretty big deal, and they got more digital subscribers than they expected in the first quarter. That's probably because they have those bundled deals and there's been a lot of news happening, which makes people want to read more.
