AI Daily: Amazon to pay NY Times $20M-$25M per year under AI deal

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

AI DEAL: Amazon (AMZN) will pay New York Times (NYT) $20M-$25M a year to license a broad range of content, The Wall Street Journal’s Alexandra Bruell reports. The annual payment amounts to nearly 1% of the Times’s total 2024 revenue, Bruell writes. The companies announced their AI-related licensing deal in May, giving Amazon access to content from the Times’s news and cooking products, along with its sports property, the Athletic, and Amazon can use the material to train AI models and feature summaries and short excerpts of Times content in its products and services, including Alexa.

AI AGE CHECKS: Google (GOOGL) said in a blog post that, “Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out age assurance to a small set of users in the U.S. to help us further protect young people as they use Google products. We’ll closely monitor this before we roll it out more widely. These measures, which we’ve already implemented in select markets where it’s worked well, are designed to recognize users who are either over or under 18 so that we can provide more age-appropriate experiences for those younger than 18.

“This is just one part of our broader commitment to online safety for young users and families. We’ve continually invested in technology, policies and literacy resources to better protect kids and teens across our platforms. Our approach includes providing automatic safeguards for users under 18 with default settings and protections, expanding parental controls through Family Link and creating dedicated, age-appropriate experiences like YouTube Kids.”

MORE META POACHING EFFORTS: Meta (META) approached over a dozen people at researcher and former interim OpenAI CEO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab to discuss joining its new superintelligence lab and one offer was for more than $1B over a multiyear span, Wired’s Kylie Robison reports. According to the report, not a single person has left TML for Meta.

STARTUP: Cerebras Systems, a startup that is developing artificial intelligence chips to challenge Nvidia (NVDA), is in talks to raise up to $1 billion in fresh funding privately, potentially delaying a plan to go public this year, according to The Information‘s Valida Pau and Cory Weinberg, citing a person familiar with the talks. Deliberations are still ongoing and Cerebras may choose not to pursue a private funding round, one source is reported to have said. 

GANNETT, PERPLEXITY DEAL: Gannett (GCI) announced a strategic deal with Perplexity, the AI-powered answer engine, to license content from USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network of over 200 local publications across the country. As part of this agreement, Gannett joins the Perplexity Publisher Program as one of the largest U.S.-based media partners, the company stated.