The AI boom has sprung up a mini-economy for content repositories, which AI companies want access to in order to train their models.
Companies like OpenAI initially trained their models by scraping data from the web. However, with the legal overhang of copyright looming, companies are looking to strike deals to formally license content going forward. Apple is one such participant. Reuters reports that Apple struck a deal to license millions of images owned by Shutterstock, a stock image site.
The value of the deal was likely in the $25-50 million range, and was said to have been signed in the months following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Apparently, multiple other big tech firms have made similar deals with Shutterstock, including Meta, Google and Amazon.
In a similar vein, it was previously reported that Apple was talking to news publishers about licensing their articles to train its AI models.
In a sign of how significant content acquisition for AI has become, the New York Times claims today that Meta even discussed buying out a book publisher like Simon & Schuster.
Although Apple has been regarded as a bit of a laggard in the recent hype train of AI advancements, the company is looking to change the narrative soon. iOS 18 is expected to heavily hero AI-powered features to improve the experience for iPhone users. iOS 18 will be officially announced at WWDC, with the keynote kicking off at 10 AM PT on June 10.
Apple marketing exec Greg Jozwiak has already confirmed the AI speculation, in a tweet about the event. He said WWDC will be Absolutely Incredible.
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