Closing post
Time to wrap up….
The New York Times has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in an escalation of a fight over intellectual content used to train generative artificial intelligence and large-language model systems.
The lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, claims that while the companies copied information from many sources to build their systems, they give New York Times content “particular emphasis” and “seek to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”.
The “unlawful use” of the paper’s “copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more” to create artificial intelligence products “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”, the lawsuit claims.
In other news….
World stocks have rallied to their highest levels since late 2022 today, amid optimism that major central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve will start cutting interest rates early next year.
The recent rally has pushed the S&P 500 index towards its highest ever level this week.
UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced the date of 6 March for a spring budget, fuelling speculation about an early general election despite the Conservatives trailing in the opinion polls.
And here’s the rest of today’s business news so far:
The New York Times’s lawsuit comes just days after Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was talking to investors about new financing that would value it at $100bn or more.
Such a valuation would confirm the ChatGPT maker as one of the world’s most valuable startups.
A New York Times spokesperson said today:
“If Microsoft and OpenAI want to use our work for commercial purposes, the law requires that they first obtain our permission.
They have not done so.”
