Image: The Verge Microsoft and OpenAI announced they're offering a select group of media outlets up to $10 million ($2.5 million in cash plus $2.5 million worth of software and enterprise credits" from each) to try out AI tools in the newsroom.This news comes while the two companies are still facing a slew of copyright lawsuits, including from The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund behind the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune. Those have continued despite licensing deals reached with many media outlets, including The Verge's parent company, Vox Media.The first round of funding will go to Newsday, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Philadelphia... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge ChatGPT is officially an AI-powered web search engine. The company is enabling real-time information in conversations for paid subscribers today (along with SearchGPT waitlist users), with free, enterprise, and education users gaining access in the coming weeks.Rather than launching as a separate product, web search will be integrated into ChatGPT's existing interface. The feature determines when to tap into web results based on queries, though users can also manually trigger web searches. ChatGPT's web search integration finally closes a key competitive gap with rivals like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, which have long offered real-time internet access in their AI conversations.This launch comes as AI-powered search heats up... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge In a stunning misstep, OpenAI engineers accidentally erased critical evidence gathered by The New York Times and other major newspapers in their lawsuit over AI training data, according to a court filing Wednesday.The newspapers' legal teams had spent over 150 hours searching through OpenAI's AI training data to find instances where their news articles were included, the filing claims. But it doesn't explain how this mistake occurred or what precisely the data included. While the filing says OpenAI admitted to the error and tried to recover the data, what it managed to salvage was incomplete and unreliable - so what was recovered cannot help properly trace how the news organizations' articles were used in building OpenAI's AI models.... Continue reading...