Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OpenAI makes a deal with the Financial Times. Who’s next? | TechCrunch Minute”.
Hey: hey, hey, look, who’s back with a brand new content deal and no it’s not Taylor. Swift! It’S open, AI! The company that is behind the well-known chat, GPT service is back with a new publisher Arrangement, this time with the financial times or, as you might know it that beige news site that has a hard pay ball and has had one since time in Memorial. Now this deal has all the stuff you would expect. It covers open ai’s use of the ft’s content for training, AI models and a bit more.
The financial times writes. The deal will also allow quote chat GPT to respond to questions with short summaries from Ft articles with links back to ft.com. I think that’s very smart. Why? Well? It means that value is going to flow both ways and not just content in One Direction and money. In the other, as we noted on Equity, the ft is also going to build new stuff using AI for its own readers. So it really does seem that everyone gets to eat from this particular deal and brings open ai’s.
Total big content deals to nearly a half dozen by my count, which means that the company is doing a pretty good job on the biz Dev side of things. That said, do not repine. Even the Ft knows, there’s a lot more to do so in a piece from the Ft announcing this deal.
Its chief executive, John ridding said – and I quote it’s right of course, that AI platforms pay Publishers for the use of their material and then, in the same article the Ft went on to write. That and again I quote: qu Google, which has also built its chatbot Gemini using content from the web, has yet to reach deals with news Publishers. I do believe that that is fancy.
British media speak for your next anyways. In short, what we are seeing is some expost facto payments Taking Flight for some training data. Now the New York Times does have a lawsuit against open AI, which could prove to be a forcing function for more of this sort of thing. But it does seem today that Publishers that are large enough and are well regarded enough are going to get at least some checks. So the question then becomes: is this enough money to actually save news? Absolutely not, but it does mean that some big pubs are going to be more financially viable and therefore stable and that’s good for everybody. One more thing. These deals do make the economics of building AI models all the more tricky. Not only do you need to pay Oodles of cash to run the damn compute work, but the source data itself is also going to had a cost associated with it, one that could actually persist and therefore turn into a recurring line item that if content costs a Lot of money to license for training, then maybe only big companies can afford to build high-end cuttingedge, AI mons. And if that’s the case, we could just see the current incumbents in Tech become the oligopoly of the world of AI. So maybe the answer here and I’ve been thinking a lot about this – is that maybe truly open- Source models can crowdsource data, but closed Source or for-profit models have to pay. I’M not sure if that would actually work, but we are watching the terms of Engagement between content and AI models get sorted out, and we really really do not want to get this wrong because it could hurt everybody more to this to come I’ll, see you tomorrow, .