The Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry You’ve Never Heard Of And The Startups Working To Take It Down; A Look into the Mind of Vinod Khosla

The old adage that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel load doesn’t resonate in the digital age as well as it used to. But there’s no doubt news publishers’ complaints about AI startups pirating their copyrighted material has drawn plenty of coverage. 

There may be a solution. A growing number of startups are emerging to try and help publishers, and other content owners, figure out how to maximize the money they can make from licensing their material to AI firms. Firms like New York City-based TollBit and London-based Human Native AI have devised technological solutions to help publishers, which otherwise are stuck negotiating one-off content licensing deals that many in the industry worry will haunt publishers in future years.

What gives these startups reason to think they can help publishers make more AI-related money is that AI firms are already spending a lot of money to get data for training their large language models or making sure their LLMs can reference up-to-date information, not always legitimately. For instance, a multi-billion dollar industry of web scraping firms are now selling data they’ve scraped from publishers’ sites to some LLM developers and AI search engines.