OpenAI and The Financial Times Ink Pact, Trading Data as If It’s Gym Time!
“The Financial Times and OpenAI strike deal over training data”
“The Financial Times (FT) and OpenAI have announced a deal that will see the British newspaper’s content used to make the artificial intelligence company’s language models better at understanding and producing high-quality news content.”
In a deal that drips with irony only comparable to the plot of a Shakespearean play, OpenAI and the Financial Times have joined hands, or should we say algorithms and printing presses? The stalwart British newspaper, steeped in ancient typewriter ink, has agreed to lend its rich content to help fine-tune the language prowess of OpenAI’s AI machines. Evidently, our AI counterparts have realized that good old-fashioned human journalism still has value, even in our relentlessly digital age.
In this mutually beneficial arrangement, OpenAI’s AI models will merrily feast upon the vast buffet of articles churned out by the FT’s seasoned journalists. The purpose? To enable these AI models to understand and produce high-quality news content. It’s almost as if we’re training puppies to learn sophisticated words, except these pups operate on complex algorithms and can quote your favorite news headline from 20 years ago. Can your goldendoodle do that? I think not.
But let’s delve a bit deeper into the hire-wire act playing out in the real-life circus ring of Artificial Intelligence and Journalism. The goal is to nourish the AI’s language skills, essentially training them to produce poetry from binary code. The Financial Times, guardians of the written word, sees this as an opportunity to “participate in the ways AI is learning to understand human language”. In other words, let’s teach robots to talk posh. Isn’t that adorably futuristic, folks?
Worthy to note is how this alliance shines a spotlight on the jazzy jitterbug between old-school print media and machine learning. Notably, the FT emphasizes that its editorial code will not be tweaked or transformed to accommodate this language-learning exercise. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that human journalists are not entirely out of fashion… yet.
This isn’t OpenAI’s first dalliance in the court of traditional media either, having previously partnered with The Guardian for a similar purpose. As the lines blur between print and pixels, one can only marvel at the world where The Financial Times waltzes with machine learning algorithms. As far as corporate sitcoms go, this just might be the most engaging plot twist yet.
Now, we wait, with bated breath and iced lattes, to see the wonders this odd couple will produce, as the language of Shakespeare is fed into rows of humming servers, teetering on the precipice of a AI language revolution.