NY Times and Amazon Ink AI Content Deal

So, check this out: The New York Times, you know, that big newspaper, is letting Amazon use its stuff for AI. Yeah, like for Alexa and other cool AI gadgets. This is actually the first time The Times has inked a deal like this just for AI.

This whole thing is a multi-year deal. It means Amazon can use articles from The Times, plus content from their cooking site and The Athletic, which is for sports stuff. The Times totally kept the money details a secret though. They just said that Amazon will show little summaries and short bits of Times content in their products, like Alexa, and also use it to train their own AI models. Pretty neat, right?

This is all happening because AI companies are kinda struggling to make their AI smarter after using up all the easy internet data. Lots of them, like the company that made ChatGPT, are even getting sued because people are saying they used their data without asking. Remember when The Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI? They said those companies used tons of their articles without permission to train their chatbots. The Times even spent a bunch of money, like $4.4 million in just three months, dealing with that lawsuit.

OpenAI even said last year they were looking to team up with people to get more data. They've already made deals with other news places like the Financial Times, Business Insider's owner, some sites in France and Spain, and Time magazine. Reuters also licensed their articles to Meta, the company that owns Facebook. So, it seems like a trend now.

An expert said that this deal with Amazon is a good chance for The Times to reach people who don't read it yet. The Times has been doing pretty well lately too. They just won four really important awards and got more online readers than they thought they would last quarter. Maybe it's because they have cool package deals and there's been a lot going on in the news?