If data is the new oil, a London-based startup is vying to become the equivalent of the New York Mercantile Exchange—a marketplace where AI companies looking for data to train their AI models can strike deals with publishers and other businesses that have data to sell.
The startup, called Human Native AI, has recently hired a number of prominent former Google executives with experience in striking content licensing deals and partnership as well as top legal eagles experienced in intellectual property and copyright issues.
To date, companies building the large language models (LLMs) that have powered the generative AI revolution have mostly harvested data, for free, by scraping the public internet, often with little regard for copyright.
But there are signs this era is rapidly drawing to a close. In the U.S., a number of lawsuits against AI companies for allegedly violating copyright law when training AI models on material taken from the internet without permission are making their way through the courts. While it is possible judges will rule that such activity can be considered “fair use,” companies creating AI models would rather not risk being tied up in court for years.
In Europe, the new EU AI Act mandates that companies disclose if they trained AI models on copyrighted material, potentially opening companies up to legal action there too.
AI companies have already been striking deals with major publishers and news organizations to license data for both training and to make sure their models have access to up-to-date, accurate information. OpenAI signed a three-year licensing deal with publisher Axel Springer, which owns Business Insider, Politico, and a number of German news organizations, reportedly worth "tens of millions of dollars." It has also signed deals with the Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Time magazine. Google has similar deals with many publishers. Fortune has a licensing agreement with generative AI startup Perplexity.
