Another day, another publication contributing to the rise of AI. First, companies like Time and Dotdash Meredith partnered with OpenAI to license their assets, now Reuters is giving Meta’s AI chatbot access to its news content to answer current events and news questions, Axios first reported.
Basically, the multi-year deal now allows users in the U.S. to receive real-time news details from Meta’s AI chatbot tool, with these answers citing and linking to relevant stories from Reuters.
This deal is Meta’s first AI news deal, but Reuters has worked with the company as a fact-checking partner since 2020. “We’re always working to improve our products and through Meta’s partnership with Reuters, Meta AI can respond to news-related questions with a summary and link to Reuters content,” a Meta spokesperson said.
The pair have not revealed whether Meta will get access to Reuters’ library to train its learning language model, Llama. The exact figures of the deal are also unclear, but sources report that Reuters is receiving compensation for this access.
Money isn’t the only form of payment that companies have made in such deals with the devil – *cough* AI (Lionsgate receives a custom AI model for production and editing in its deal with Runaways).
Like the roughly 20 newsrooms that OpenAI has partnered with, Axios seems to have forgotten that the scorpion stung the frog.
Instead, we have this great statement from Axios co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei: “We launched Axios Local nearly four years ago with the bold goal of bringing local news to communities across the country. OpenAI’s investment allows us to continue our expansion and help deliver essential local news to qualified audiences.”
Axios will be able to use OpenAI’s technology to create its own AI-powered systems and products. However, VandeHei issued a memo to employees stating that said technology would not be used for story reporting (of course, because no one has ever been fired in favor of AI before – oh wait, wait a little more and the list goes on).
However, Axios’ announcement points out that The New York Times is currently suing both OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, so perhaps there’s some awareness of what it’s doing.