Meta, Facebook’s parent company, may follow OpenAI in striking paid deals with news publishers for AI model training

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is reportedly exploring the possibility of paying news organizations to enhance the training of its AI language models. This move comes as Meta aims to improve the effectiveness and competitiveness of its generative AI tools, including Meta AI, in the market of generative AI search tools and chatbots offered by tech giants like Google and Microsoft.

According to a report by Business Insider, sources familiar with the matter revealed that internal discussions are taking place within Meta about potentially striking deals with news publishers to gain more access to news, photo, and video content. One source mentioned that Meta may be compelled to pay someone for this access.

Despite these discussions, Meta has not yet approached any news outlets about licensing content, and talks are still ongoing. Any agreements for data access for model training would be separate from previous deals where Meta paid publishers to host links on its platforms.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that the company has a vast amount of data for training its Llama models, surpassing even the Common Crawl dataset. However, concerns have been raised internally about the quality of this data, as posts and comments on social media platforms may not provide the high-quality training data needed for generative AI tools.

In a similar move, OpenAI recently struck a $250 million deal with News Corp, granting the AI company access to content from over a dozen news publishers to train its AI models, including the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. This partnership highlights the growing trend of tech companies collaborating with news organizations to enhance their AI capabilities.