OpenAI, a leading generative AI company, has announced a partnership with Axel Springer, one of the world’s largest publishing conglomerates. Axel Springer owns renowned brands like Politico, Business Insider, BILD, and WELT. This collaboration aims to provide summaries of Axel Springer’s articles and other journalism content to OpenAI’s ChatGPT users, along with visual elements such as charts, videos, and potentially audio podcasts. OpenAI will also gain access to new human-authored articles and content to further train its AI models.
Enhancing User Experience
The summaries provided will include links back to the full articles on Axel Springer’s publishing websites, ensuring proper attribution. Users will be able to refer to Axel Springer’s journalistic content and ask questions, receiving answers from ChatGPT.
According to the Financial Times, OpenAI is investing “tens of millions of euros a year” for this partnership. While this may seem significant for media publishers, it aligns with OpenAI’s valuation of approximately $90 billion. This collaboration marks OpenAI’s most significant step towards its journalism aspirations, having previously partnered with the Associated Press and the American Journalism Project.
Real-time Knowledge and Authority
One criticism of ChatGPT has been its lack of real-time knowledge. OpenAI’s move to acquire recent and breaking news content from Axel Springer’s titles, combined with its extensive historical archive, aims to address this issue. By offering an authoritative and comparable real-time information service, OpenAI aims to compete with Elon Musk’s xAI and other news outlets in delivering up-to-date information.
This partnership not only benefits OpenAI and Axel Springer but also raises questions about how OpenAI previously obtained content for training its GPT models without compensation or consent. The company currently faces copyright infringement lawsuits from individual authors and creators, highlighting the potential legal implications. Users on X (formerly Twitter) have criticized OpenAI’s apparent discrepancy when dealing with large publishers versus smaller individuals.
