The partnership aims to improve ChatGPT's understanding and capabilities in relation to current events as well as real-time information.

The agreement stipulates that Axel Springer will provide summaries and excerpts of its reports to OpenAI, including the most popular titles such as Politico, Business Insider, BILD and WELT. OpenAI intends to utilize this material to train its AI systems, as well as surface useful Axel Springer articles to ChatGPT users who ask questions related to the latest news.

The summaries offered to ChatGPT will include attribution to the full Axel Springer articles, essentially providing publicity and traffic for the publisher. ChatGPT users will also be able ask ChatGPT questions that reference the information contained across these German newspaper conglomerate's brand names.

OpenAI along with Axel Springer bring news to ChatGPT

The partnership appears to be aimed at solving one of the major critiques of ChatGPT -- its lack of current information about the latest events. Applications like xAI's brand new Grok chatbot boast more real-time intelligence through the use of stream of social media's data. By licensing archival and current content from major newsrooms, OpenAI hopes to surpass and match these capabilities.

The Springer deal builds on past OpenAI agreements with the Associated Press and American Journalism Project to train AI models based on journalism. As OpenAI is still facing questions about copyright infringement when scraping content without consent license agreements with major publishers provide legal coverage -however, they also face criticism around fairness and compensation for smaller sources.

While the partnership does provide an obvious financial benefit to Springer However, the question is what is the right way to conduct business for OpenAI to make such agreements with large publishers while scraping content from creators independent of the company and not offering the right to compensation. Finding the right balance in getting training data is proving to be a thorny issue even for the top-resourced AI companies.