“Financial Times and OpenAI enter into content licensing agreement”. The British economic and financial daily chose to announce this partnership through one of its journalists, Madhumita Murgia, who covers subjects related to artificial intelligence, in addition to issuing a press release.
If the amount of the agreement has not been disclosed, it is a safe bet that it is a substantial sum, and for good reason: OpenAI will be able to train its artificial intelligence models on archived content of Financial Times (FT).
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A win-win agreement
Under the terms of the agreement, the FT will license its resources to the creator of ChatGPT to help it “develop generative artificial intelligence technology capable of creating text, images and code indistinguishable from human creations.” In return, the approximately 180 million monthly active users will be able to access the newspaper's articles via the chatbot, the latter being able to answer questions with short summaries of FT articles, with links redirecting to FT. com.
In his communicatedthe British daily also specifies that it is “became a ChatGPT Enterprise customer earlier this year, purchasing access for all FT employees” on the sidelines of the partnership made public this week.
The media industry must come to terms with AI
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“As well as the benefits for the FT, there are wider implications for the industry. It is right, of course, for AI platforms to pay publishers for the use of their material. OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution and remuneration – all essential elements for us”, said John Ridding, CEO of the FT. And he is not the only one to have this position.
This is the fifth such deal OpenAI has struck in the past year, following similar deals with Associated Press (UNITED STATES), Axel Springer (Germany), The world (France) and Prisa Media (Spain). For each of these agreements, financial terms were not disclosed.
However, it is specified thatAxel Springer expected to earn tens of millions of euros per year by allowing OpenAI to access the content of its publications such as Bild, Politico And Business Insider. This agreement includes a one-time payment for the news group's archived content and a larger fee paid as part of an annual licensing agreement to allow OpenAI to access more recent information.
Not all media are of the same opinion regarding OpenAI
OpenAI has, however, made some enemies since the launch of its famous ChatGPT tool. In December 2023, The New York Times became the first major US media group to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that the two technology companies had benefited from a “free access” to millions of articles to develop the models that underpin ChatGPT. The major American daily calls for “billions of dollars in damage” to OpenAI as well as taking models powered by its content offline.
More recently, The New York Times has revealed that OpenAI has, using its speech recognition tool Whisper, literally sucked the audio from millions of hours of videos on YouTube in order to transcribe them and turn them into usable data for training its large language models .
The American daily thus affirms that Whisper was more or less created for this purpose in order to accelerate the development of GPT-4, the final version which powers the AI conversational assistant, ChatGPT. The affair has barely made any noise and for good reason: YouTube's parent company, Google, acted in the same way, and does not want to publicize the affair, at the risk of also finding itself implicated.
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