NYT and Amazon Team Up on AI Content

So, get this: The New York Times is letting Amazon use its articles and stuff for their AI things, like Alexa. This is a pretty big deal cause it's the first time The Times has done a deal like this for AI. The agreement is for a few years, and Amazon can use articles from The Times, plus recipes from NYT Cooking and even sports from The Athletic. They didn't say how much money is involved though, which is always a little mysterious, right?

The Times said this means snippets and summaries of their content will show up in Amazon products, and also help train Amazon's AI language models. Honestly, it makes sense cause AI companies are kinda running out of easy info to train their models on. Lots of them, like the company that made ChatGPT, are even getting sued over using data without permission.

Speaking of lawsuits, The Times actually sued Microsoft and OpenAI last year. The Times said they used tons of their articles to teach chatbots how to answer questions, and they didn't even ask! The Times even spent over $4 million on lawyer fees for that lawsuit in just the first few months of this year.

OpenAI said they were looking for partners to get data for their AI training, and it looks like they've been busy! They've already made deals with other news places like the Financial Times, Business Insider's owner, newspapers in France and Spain, and even Time magazine. Reuters also made a deal with Meta (the Facebook company) to use their articles for AI last year.

Someone who watches the market said this deal with Amazon is a good chance for The Times to get noticed by people who aren't subscribers yet. The Times has been doing pretty good lately, tbh. They just won four Pulitzer Prizes and got more digital subscribers than they thought they would earlier this year. Guess all their special offers and the crazy news lately helped!