Why is OpenAI collaborating with Axel Springer?

Recently, OpenAI surprisingly announced a partnership with German media company Axel Springer to integrate the latest news from publications like Politico and Business Insider into ChatGPT.

This collaboration also has additional benefits for Axel Springer. OpenAI will use data obtained from news publications to train its models and, in return, pay fees to Axel Springer. This is not the first time OpenAI has partnered with a media company; earlier this year, it collaborated with the Associated Press.

Why Germany?

OpenAI's relationship with the European Union (EU) is not harmonious. Interestingly, in April, Germany considered banning ChatGPT due to privacy concerns. Now, OpenAI's collaboration with a German media company may provide them with some relief from government authorities.

Recently, the EU passed the EU AI Act, which requires foundational models to comply with specific transparency obligations before being deployed. The EU distinguishes general AI models based on risk, and OpenAI falls into the high-risk category. The collaboration with Axel Springer will assist OpenAI in proving to EU officials that it did not use stolen data while training its models.

Interestingly, earlier this year, OpenAI lobbied the EU and debated with European officials, requesting them not to classify their general AI systems, including GPT-3 (the predecessor of ChatGPT), and image generator Dall-E 2, as "high-risk."

In addition, during the EU discussions, Germany, France, and Italy opposed imposing the AI Act on open-source companies, resulting in exemptions for these companies. It is worth noting that German AI startup Aleph Alpha recently raised $500 million in Series B funding and is considered one of the competitors to OpenAI in Europe.

OpenAI Challenges Grok

Interestingly, this collaboration was officially announced at a time when everyone was praising Grok for its ability to access real-time information through the X platform. Recently, Musk launched Grok to Premium+ subscribers on the X platform, and xAI plans to expand Grok to 47 countries, including India, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore.

It is likely that OpenAI will only provide real-time news access to ChatGPT Plus users, similar to Musk's approach with Grok. Interestingly, OpenAI has now reactivated ChatGPT subscriptions, which were temporarily suspended due to increased traffic after OpenAI Devday.

Currently, the X platform has more premium users than ChatGPT Plus. The X platform has approximately 640,000 premium users, while ChatGPT has 180 million users. However, there are no specific numbers to indicate how many of them are paying users.

Grok has a significant advantage as it does not rely on any specific media company and can access all the information posted by users on the platform. Citizen journalism has gained great popularity recently, and Musk has voiced his support for it.

Although OpenAI trains its models using available data on the internet, providing news from selected media companies may introduce bias, which raises questions for OpenAI's safety team.

Despite its drawbacks, this collaboration may lead to improvements in ChatGPT, generating more accurate information and reducing illusions. The X platform has a wealth of information, but distinguishing between truth and falsehood may be a challenging task.

A few days ago, an interesting incident occurred where it was revealed that Grok unintentionally used OpenAI's data.

A user on the X platform shared a screenshot where Grok's response was based on OpenAI's data. However, XAI engineer Igor Babuschkin quickly clarified the situation, saying, "The issue is that the internet is full of ChatGPT outputs, so when we trained Grok with a large amount of web data, we unintentionally selected some of it."

Although Grok currently has an advantage in providing real-time information compared to OpenAI, this can be seen as OpenAI's attempt to counterattack.