NY Times Partners with Amazon for AI Content
So, get this: The New York Times just made a pretty big deal with Amazon. It seems like the Times is letting Amazon use all their news articles and stuff for things like Alexa, you know, those AI voice assistants? This is actually the first time the NYT has done a deal like this with AI.
The deal covers articles from the main Times, plus also content from NYT Cooking and even The Athletic, which is their sports site. They didn't say how much money is involved, but it's for a few years. Basically, Amazon will be able to show little bits of Times articles in their products, and also use the info to train their own AI models.
Why is this happening now? Well, AI companies are kinda running out of data to make their AI smarter. It's getting tough to find new stuff to train them on. And also, a lot of these AI companies, like the one that made ChatGPT, are getting sued because people are saying they used content without permission.
Remember how the Times actually sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year? They were saying those companies used tons of their articles to train their chatbots without asking. The Times even said they spent millions of dollars on lawyers for that lawsuit in just the first three months of this year. I mean, crazy, right?
OpenAI, the company Sam Altman is in charge of, said last year they were trying to make deals to get access to data. And they've made quite a few! They've teamed up with the Financial Times, Business Insider's owner, a couple of French and Spanish news places, and even Time magazine. And Reuters also let Meta, the Facebook company, use their articles for an AI thing.
Someone who looks at these things, an analyst named Max Willens, thinks this Amazon deal is a good way for the Times to maybe get new people to subscribe. They've been doing pretty well lately, tbh. They just won a bunch of Pulitzer Prizes, which is a big deal, and they got more online subscribers than they thought they would earlier this year. That probably helped that they have those bundled deals and also just a lot of important news happening.
