NYT Licenses Content to Amazon for AI Use
Okay, so you know how the New York Times has all those cool articles? Well, guess what? They're letting Amazon use 'em for their AI stuff, like maybe even Alexa. Yeah, it's a pretty big deal, the first time NYT has done a licensing thing just for generative AI. This whole agreement is gonna last for a few years, and Amazon gets to use stories from the New York Times, plus stuff from NYT Cooking and that sports site, The Athletic. The publishers didn't actually say how much money is changing hands, though.
NYT spilled the beans, saying this deal means Amazon can show quick summaries and little bits of Times content right inside their products and services, like Alexa. Plus, they can use it to train Amazon's special AI models. It's kinda wild, right?
This whole thing is happening because AI companies are, like, really struggling to make their big language models better after they've pretty much used up all the easy data out there. Also, a bunch of them, including the folks behind ChatGPT, are getting sued because people are saying they used data without permission. Remember last year? The Times actually sued Microsoft and OpenAI, saying they ripped off tons of their articles to help train those chatbots. NYT even said they had to pay out $4.4 million just for lawyer fees in the first few months of the year because of that lawsuit. Yikes!
Sam Altman, who's in charge of OpenAI, said last year they were looking to team up with people to get access to public and private data for training their AI models. And since then, they've made deals with a bunch of other news places, like the Financial Times, Business Insider, Le Monde from France, Prisa Media in Spain, and even Time magazine. Reuters even licensed their stories to Meta Platforms in 2024. It seems like everyone's getting into the AI content game, maybe?
An analyst named Max Willens from Emarketer thinks this Amazon deal is a super chance for the Times to show off their stuff to people who don't subscribe yet. That's a smart move, tbh. You know, the Times just won four Pulitzer Prizes recently, which is awesome! And they got way more digital subscribers than they thought they would in the first few months of the year. It seems like their bundled deals and all the crazy news happening are getting more people to read what they write. It makes you wonder, how much will this AI deal help them grow even more?
