“It's the Wild West”: Why Silicon Valley’s AI Race Could Leave the Media In Tatters

Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair

Ever since the rise of social media, news publishers have always been playing an unwinnable game of catch-up, chasing the changes in Big Tech’s byzantine algorithms to ensure the clicks keep coming. But with AI now in the picture, the playing field is about to get even more lopsided, according to Wired editor in chief Katie Drummond and Axios Senior Media Reporter Sara Fischer. Joining Brian Stelter on the latest episode of Inside the Hive, the two media mavens discuss how tech companies like OpenAI have painted outlets into a corner by offering lucrative licensing deals that could later come back to bite them. “If you strike a deal, you get to experiment with the top technology in generative AI while your competitors do not,” says Fischer, but you “don’t fully understand…the risk of what you're giving up and how valuable it could be.”