On Friday, Meta Platforms announced that its artificial intelligence chatbot will now utilize content from Reuters to provide real-time answers to user inquiries regarding news and current events. This marks another significant collaboration between a major tech company and a news publisher. However, neither Meta nor Reuters' parent company, Thomson Reuters, revealed any financial specifics related to the partnership.
This deal represents Meta's first engagement with news content in several years, coinciding with a period during which the parent company of Facebook has been scaling back news offerings on its platforms. This reduction has come in response to criticism from regulators and publishers over issues like misinformation and disputes surrounding revenue-sharing arrangements.
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Meta AI, the chatbot developed by the company Meta, is integrated across various services, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. However, Meta has not clarified whether it intends to leverage Reuters content for training its large language model, leaving some questions about the extent of this new collaboration.
Paid Partnership Between Meta & Reuters
A Reuters spokesperson said, “We can confirm that Reuters has partnered with tech providers to license our trusted, fact-based news content to power their AI platforms. The terms of these deals remain confidential.”
Reuters will be compensated for access to its journalism under a multi-year deal, according to a report on Friday from Axios, which first published the news.
Through its partnership with Reuters, “Meta AI can respond to news-related questions with summaries and links to Reuters content,” said a Meta spokesperson in a statement sent by email.
Other companies including ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Jeff Bezos-backed startup Perplexity have struck similar AI partnerships with news organizations.
Reuters already has a fact-checking partnership with Meta, which kicked off in 2020.