News Media Meets AI: OpenAI and Google’s Bold Move
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Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about two big deals, one with OpenAI and one with Google, both involving making new deals with the news. This is something that's really interesting because we've essentially seen this trend for a while, but it seems like it's picking up.

And today, in regards to OpenAI, we found out that OpenAI is bankrolling Axios expansion into four new markets. This is one of the first times where we actually get inside the deal that's going on. We get a little bit of intel. And we are literally seeing news organizations that have been struggling for quite a long time over the last few years.

start to literally get funded completely by AI companies. So this is absolutely fascinating. I'll be breaking down everything going on. Before I get into that, I wanted to say, if you've ever wanted to start an online side hustle or grow and scale your business with AI tools, I would love to have you as a member of the AI Hustle School community. We have over 300 members. Last month, this was $100 a month. We've dropped the price. It is a

January New Year's discount to $19 a month. So if you want to get in, we record exclusive content every single week, stuff I don't post anywhere else where I essentially break down exactly what tools, strategies, workflows I am using, what AI tools to grow and scale my businesses. So this is something that you'd be interested in doing. The link is in the description or the show notes, and I would love to have you as a member of the AI Hustle School community.

All right, let's get into what's going on. The first thing I wanted to talk about is Google. So we're gonna get into opening ideal in a minute because I think that's really interesting, but I want to say Google has just made a new deal with the Associated Press that's essentially bringing more real-time info, real-time news into Gemini, their chatbot. Now, the reason why I think this is interesting is because this is an area that I think is going to be win or lose for a lot of AI companies. When I look at companies like,

Anthropics Claude that doesn't have access to the internet, it blows my brain and I'm like, what is going on? This is terrible. It's like honestly one of the biggest reasons why I don't use Claude on a very regular basis is just not having access to the internet. Very frequently I am now finding myself using Grok, which is grok.com

And the reason why is because they have access to everything that's going down in real time, because essentially this is XAI's tool. And so if you're going to ask it something like, you know, what is happening in politics today?

If you go and ask that to something like Claude, it's going to struggle and it's going to say something like, I should note that my knowledge cutoff is April 2024. Okay, so last year, not very useful for me.

it doesn't know what's going on. If you go over to something like grok and even chat GPT is now doing great with internet. Um, it's going to be able to find stuff. So they're grabbing a lot of this information from news if they want it to be really cutting edge. And that's what these deals are, uh,

essentially spelling out. This is what we're seeing with Google and now opening eyes, making more and more of these deals. And I think the reason is because they all have to compete quite directly, um, with grok.com, which is kind of the new standalone website. This used to just be built into, um, uh,

It was just built into essentially X or Twitter, and that was not super – I don't know. In my opinion, I hate going to another website, like a social media website, to have to use a tool. So the fact that Grok now has just Grok.com.

And they've made a standalone app, um, on the iPhone, I think is very, very smart. Now, if you go to grok and you ask, you know, what's happening in politics, it's going to give you a breakdown. Donald Trump is preparing to be sworn in as president. Um, there is, you know, substantial changes within the administration and it's talking about what's going on there. Uh,

all of this stuff. There's a mention of Project 2025, whatever. It's just got all this stuff. And what's interesting to me is there's news sites that are sourced for all of this information, but also you can click on X posts and you can see what people on X are actually saying about the news and what's going on there. So you're seeing actual commentary and people, whatever. And

And then you can also go over and look at all of the news sources with this. So this is very powerful. I think Claude 100% is going to lose out big time if they don't implement this. And we're seeing that ChatGPT does a fairly good job with this, so I'm not going to roast them on this. But I think with all of this going down, we definitely are going to need to see...

more and more of these kind of news deals because not everybody has access to, you know, just the giant data set that Grok has. And so Elon's XAI is going to really start out competing a lot of these players. Okay, what is going on with the deal? So,

obviously they're trying to make this thing more useful. That's what Jafar Zayed, Google's VP of global news partnerships said. They said, as we develop new AI offerings and products, we're identifying specific types of information and data that can help improve our products and services for people everywhere. This new feed will be particularly helpful to our users looking for up-to-date information. So they're talking about the Associated Press. They made this deal with the Associated Press. They're going to be getting all of their articles in there

A lot of times when these deals happen, it's like, oh, we could go train off of your data, aka, they already trained off of Associated Press's data. They just don't want to get into a lawsuit, I'm assuming. That's one element of it. The other element, though, is really like they want to have

cutting edge information, you know, rag model that can go and grab the latest stuff that Associated Press is writing, probably get an API straight into like the most cutting edge news. And they're going to compete directly with something like Grok Associated

essentially in that. So Google has a longstanding relationship with them. Part of this is to use their data. OpenAI has also making all of these deals and they have partnerships with Financial Times, Axel Springer and News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal.

Then we also have Perplexity, which is kind of like the AI-powered search engine that's competing with Google. And they have a program that they launched that essentially allows publishers to earn a little bit of revenue whenever their story is mentioned or there's kind of a link out to them. Now, what's interesting is this is something that kind of launched or got announced back in July of last year. So this isn't anything brand new. And I haven't heard a lot of people talk about how lucrative or any of the numbers are.

related to that. But I do think this is a good, I think this is a good trend and probably a good way to see that we're, you know, we're getting some sort of monetization and compensation for people that are writing content that's getting included. So a bunch of these deals, like I mentioned, have this kind of training component.

So, Conde Nast, famously the publisher, agreed to let a bunch of different AI players have licensing agreements to train their AI models on their archives, all of the content that they have. And this is...

Like AI is saying like all these AI companies are like, oh yeah, this is like to make our model better. Really, I think it's just trying to shield them from copyright claims. So that's the big thing. But what's interesting here is there was a recent study done by Columbia University saying including the data from these news articles into the training set doesn't actually make...

these chatbots that much better so columbia university's toe center for digital journalism they did the study and they showed essentially that chat gpt from openai misquoted content even from publishers that have agreements with openai meaning they have these agreements but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's accurately quoting the information there so that is quite interesting

In any case, I think this is something that is going to be really important for a lot of news organizations. This is a great new monetization method, something that they are definitely struggling with right now. And so I think this is something we're going to see more and more of. Okay, last thing I wanted to cover is opening eyes deal with Axios. They're essentially bankrolling Axios to expand into four new areas, Pittsburgh, Kansas,

Kansas City, Missouri, Boulder, Colorado, Huntsville, Alabama. They're expanding into four new local areas because Axios kind of has this thing where they'll go and make like newsletters and kind of this local news newsletter thing going on. I think it's very smart. Axios also uses a lot of AI to essentially help them come up with their news, their snippets, their summaries, what's going on. And no doubt they have deals with OpenAI,

sure to help fund their expansion, but I guarantee Axios is using OpenAI as their AI provider to help them summarize and create a lot of their news services. So it's kind of like, you know, a deal where OpenAI is paying them. They're probably paying OpenAI in credits. Maybe they're even getting paid in credits. So,

This is very interesting. Axios or OpenAI in a blog post said, in the next phase of our work, including our latest partnership with Axios, we're focusing on helping publishers more effectively integrate our tools to benefit their missions and their business. So really, like I was saying, this isn't just about OpenAI getting access to Axios, but it's about OpenAI helping publishers

news companies use them instead of other people. So I think this is a great deal for both of these companies. I'm really curious to see how this rolls out with AI in the news in the future. Are journalists going to go extinct because everything's gonna be written by AI and maybe just, uh, and, and before you say like, Oh, that's crazy. Um,

you know, who's going to write, who's going to find out information. I think citizen journalism is taking off to a huge degree last year on the right and on the left. I think we're going to see this more and more and people are just kind of publishing this on Substack or on X or on Blue Sky or wherever. And I think that a lot of these news organizations that we see today are eventually just going to be AIs that have

maybe like an editorial team, but they go and scrape these data sources, the conversations, the stuff there. Maybe there's people that go and review some of the facts to try to make sure it's legit. But at the end of the day, I think this is where a lot of news is going. And so it's gonna be interesting to see where that goes in the future. But that's just me making my predictions.

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