AI and musical chairs
The Financial Times has announced the signing of a strategic content licensing agreement with OpenAI to train its generative artificial intelligence models on the newspaper’s 136+ years of news archive to develop text, images or code, and ChatGPT to answer questions from its more than 100 million users around the world using short summaries of Financial Times news stories accompanied by the corresponding links.
Such deals are becoming commonplace: this is OpenAI’s fifth, having previously announced similar agreements with Associated Press in the United States, Axel Springer in Germany, Le Monde in France and PRISA in Spain.
Again, OpenAI is moving faster than rivals such as Google, which could find itself being left further behind if the public gets used to using generative interfaces such as ChatGPT to read about certain topics. A large number of search engine queries relate to news or current affairs, and a well-written response with links to corresponding news stories from prestigious media outlets may be a value proposition Google simply can’t match.
Its recent agreements with major news outlets could give OpenAI the edge over Google’s Gemini, while allowing it to continue to make progress without having to go through a thousand and one lawsuits with endless intellectual property arguments, such as those it is going to face with The New York Times…
