NYT and Amazon Partner on AI Content
Okay, so you know how The New York Times is a big deal with news and stuff? Well, they just did something pretty interesting. They're letting Amazon use their articles and content for things like Alexa, you know, that smart assistant?
This is the first time the Times has made a deal like this for this whole AI thing that's getting bigger. It's a multi-year deal and includes all the regular news, plus stuff from NYT Cooking and even their sports site, The Athletic. They haven't said how much money is involved, though. Basically, Amazon can show little bits of Times articles in their products, and use the content to teach their AI models. Pretty wild, right?
It seems like AI companies really need more data to get better because they've already used up all the easy stuff out there. A lot of them, even the company that made ChatGPT, are facing lawsuits because people say they used their data without asking. The Times actually sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year, saying they used tons of their articles to train their chatbots without permission. The Times even had to spend over $4 million on legal costs for that lawsuit in just one quarter.
The company behind ChatGPT even said last year that they wanted to work with others to get more data sets. Since then, theyâve made deals with a bunch of other news places like the Financial Times, Business Insider, French and Spanish newspapers, and even Time magazine. Reuters also made a deal with Meta (thatâs the company that owns Facebook and Instagram) to use their articles for their AI chatbot.
An analyst named Max Willens thinks this deal with Amazon is a cool chance for the Times to get in front of people who aren't subscribers yet. The Times has been doing pretty well lately, too. They just won four Pulitzer Prizes and got more digital subscribers than they thought they would in the first part of the year. Maybe it's because of their special offers and there's just a lot of news happening that makes people want to read more?
