OpenAI’s deals with publishers could spell trouble for rivals

OpenAI’s legal battle with The Recent York Times over data to coach its AI models might still be brewing. But OpenAI’s forging ahead on deals with other publishers, including a few of France’s and Spain’s largest news publishers.

OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it signed contracts with Le Monde and Prisa Media to bring French and Spanish news content to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. In a blog post, OpenAI said that the partnership will put the organizations’ current events coverage — from brands including El País, Cinco Días, As and El Huffpost — in front of ChatGPT users where it is sensible, in addition to contribute to OpenAI’s ever-expanding volume of coaching data.

OpenAI writes:

Over the approaching months, ChatGPT users will have the opportunity to interact with relevant news content from these publishers through select summaries with attribution and enhanced links to the unique articles, giving users the power to access additional information or related articles from their news sites … We’re continually improving ChatGPT and are supporting the essential role of the news industry in delivering real-time, authoritative information to users.

So, OpenAI’s revealed licensing deals with a handful of content providers at this point. Now felt like a great opportunity to take stock:

• Stock media library Shutterstock (for images, videos and music training data)
• The Associated Press
• Axel Springer (owner of Politico and Business Insider, amongst others)
• Le Monde
• Prisa Media

How much is OpenAI paying each? Well, it’s not saying — at the least not publicly. But we are able to estimate.

The Information reported in January that OpenAI was offering publishers between $1 million and $5 million a 12 months to access archives to coach its GenAI models. That doesn’t tell us much in regards to the Shutterstock partnership. But on the article licensing front — assuming The Information’s reporting is accurate and people figures haven’t modified since then — OpenAI’s shelling out between $4 million and $20 million a 12 months for news.

That is perhaps pennies to OpenAI, whose warchest sits at over $11 billion and whose annualized revenue recently topped $2 billion (per Financial Times). But as Hunter Walk, a partner at Homebrew and the co-founder of Screendoor, recently mused, it’s substantial enough to potentially edge out AI rivals also pursuing licensing agreements.

Walk writes on his blog:

[I]f experimentation is gated by nine figures price of licensing deals, we’re doing a disservice to innovation … The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of coaching data are making a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech firms can establish a high enough cost, they implicitly prevent future competition.

Now, whether there’s a barrier to entry today is debatable. Many — if not most — AI vendors have chosen to risk the wrath of IP holders, opting to not license the info on which they’re training AI models. There’s evidence that art-generating platform Midjourney, for instance, is training on Disney movie stills — and Midjourney has no take care of Disney.

The tougher query to wrestle with is: should licensing simply be the price of doing business and experimentation within the AI space?

Walk would argue not. He advocates for a regulator-imposed “protected harbor” that’d protect any AI vendor — in addition to small-time startups and researchers — from legal liability as long as they abide by certain transparency and ethical standards.

Interestingly, the U.K. recently tried to codify something along those lines, exempting the usage of text and data mining for AI training from copyright considerations as long as it’s for research purposes. But those efforts ended up falling through.

Me, I’m unsure I’d go up to now as Walk in his “protected harbor” proposal considering the impact AI threatens to have on an already-destabilized news industry. A recent model from The Atlantic found that, if a search engine like Google were to integrate AI into search, it’d answer a user’s query 75% of the time without requiring a click-through to its website.

But perhaps there is room for carve-outs.

Publishers must be paid — and paid fairly. Is there not an end result, though, wherein they’re paid and challengers to AI incumbents — in addition to academics — get access to the identical data as those incumbents? I should think so. Grants are a technique. Larger VC checks are one other.

I can’t say I actually have the answer, particularly on condition that the courts have yet to come to a decision whether — and to what extent — fair use shields AI vendors from copyright claims. However it’s vital we tease these items out. Otherwise, the industry could well find yourself in a situation where academic ‘brain drain’ continues unabated and only a number of powerful firms have access to vast pools of beneficial training sets.