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The New York Times (NYT) is suing Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, over copyright infringement. The paper alleges millions of its articles were used to train AI programs and wants the companies to be held accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” Yahoo Finance Live has the breaking details.
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Video Transcript
BRAD SMITH: "The New York Times" has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Filed in a federal district court in Manhattan, the lawsuit says millions of articles from "The Times" were used to train AI chat bots that now directly compete with the news publisher. The suit says that the defendants should be held responsible for, quote, "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages," end quote.
The suit is a first of its kind, marking the first time a major media organization has sued the companies here. And we've been keeping tabs on shares of both NYT, as well as some of the other major news publications here this morning, just to see if there's movement. Not a ton as of right now.
BRIAN SOZZI: Well, I think you have to really break this down to two areas, Brad. First is what does it mean to some of the biggest companies in the market. Of course, OpenAI and Microsoft have really just seen their fortunes explode over the past year because the market has viewed these companies as really basically, they could do whatever they want in terms of AI, and nobody's going to challenge them.
What does it mean for a company like Google, which is going to have to ingest large amounts of information from the likes of "The New York Times" and other major publishers to train its large language models. And just talking to a lot of publishers in the industry of late, they're concerned about, first of all, they've had revenue drop from social media. So they're not really getting any revenue from these spaces anymore-- Facebook, you name it.
Now, they're being tasked with giving this information in some form to some of these tech companies, and they're not liking it because it's the path to getting paid is not yet clear.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, absolutely. I've got the filing actually in front of me right now. And the OpenAI release of ChatGPT has driven its valuation, as we've spoken recently, as "The New York Times" acknowledges here within the filing, to as high as $90 billion. And the defendants, gen AI business interests are deeply intertwined.
Microsoft recently highlighting that its use of OpenAI's best in class frontier models has generated customers, including AI startups from Microsoft's Azure AI product. I think at the end of this, them even bringing this up points to the fact that, well, where's our cut? You're using--