U.S. news organisation the New York Times is suing ChatGPT-owner OpenAI over claims its copyright was infringed to train the system.
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for using its news stories to train chatbots without permission or compensation. The lawsuit claims that the defendants have infringed on the paper’s intellectual property rights and seek to ‘free-ride’ on its investment in journalism.
The lawsuit also alleges that the chatbots pose a threat to the jobs of journalists and the quality of news reporting. The New York Times is seeking damages and an injunction to stop the defendants from using its content. The lawsuit, which also names Microsoft as a defendant, says the firms should be held responsible for ‘billions of dollars’ in damages.
Permission
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) ‘learn’ by analysing a massive amount of data often sourced online. The lawsuit claims ‘millions’ of articles published by the New York Times were used without its permission to make ChatGPT smarter, and claims the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a trustworthy information source.
It alleges that when asked about current events, ChatGPT will sometimes generate excerpts ‘verbatim’ from New York Times articles, which cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription.
Subscription
According to the lawsuit, this means readers can get New York Times content without paying for it – meaning it is losing out on subscription revenue as well as advertising clicks from people visiting the website.
It also gave the example of the Bing search engine – which has some features powered by ChatGPT – producing results taken from a New York Times-owned website, without linking to the article or including referral links it uses to generate income.
For true cryptocurrency bulls, the most lucrative investments in 2023 were in the stock market.
While Bitcoin rallied over 150% for the year, shares of Coinbase, Marathon Digital, MicroStrategy and the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which are all tied closely to the digital currency, did substantially better, rising more than 300% in value. Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital soared some 688%.
Outperform
Not only have these stocks outperformed primary cryptocurrency, but they’ve been among the biggest gainers across the whole U.S. stock market. In the universe of publicly traded U.S. businesses with a market value of at least $5 billion, the four Bitcoin-tied stocks were among the eight best performers, according to analysts.
Boom or bust?
The crypto boom represents a major recovery from 2022, when coin prices plummeted, taking related equities down with them. A year highlighted by hedge fund collapses, crypto lender failures and crippling losses at miners was punctuated in November 2022, when crypto exchange FTX spiralled into bankruptcy, leading to the arrest of founder Sam Bankman-Fried on fraud charges.
A jury in New York convicted Bankman-Fried on seven criminal counts
Bankman-Fried conviction
In 2023, a New York jury convicted Bankman-Fried on seven criminal counts, setting the 31-year-old former billionaire up for a possible long-stretch behind bars. Weeks later, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder of crypto exchange Binance, pleaded guilty and stepped down as the company’s CEO as part of a $4.3 billion settlement with the Department of Justice. He faces a possible prison sentence of 18 months or longer.
By the time of Bankman-Fried’s conviction and Zhao’s plea deal, the damage to the broader crypto market had mostly been realised, and investors were looking to the future. One of the biggest drivers for bitcoin this year was an easing of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, which created a more attractive case for riskier assets, but only marginally.
Bitcoin halving due May 2024 & ETF’s
Prices were also bolstered by the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which takes place every four years and is scheduled for May 2024. In the halving process, the reward for mining is cut in half, capping the supply of bitcoin.
Additional buying was sparked by the potential for a flurry of bitcoin exchange-traded funds popping up in the new year.
Marathon
Among companies closely tied to Bitcoin, the best-performing stock this year was Marathon, a mining firm that just eclipsed that market cap level last week thanks to a 125% surge in December as of Tuesday’s close. On Wednesday, the shares surged another 15%.
Last year at this time, Marathon was hanging on by a thread. The company was in the midst of a quarter that ended with a loss of almost $400 million on sales of just $28.4 million because of tumbling bitcoin prices
Mining
Bitcoin mining is an expensive operation because of the high energy costs required to operate the supercomputers. A drop in bitcoin prices means a sharp reduction in the money producers make selling the coins they mine, even as their energy bills get little relief.
Outside of the mining universe, the best-performing crypto stock in the U.S. this year is Coinbase, which has soared some 386% into 2023 year end.
Coinbase
As the only major publicly traded crypto exchange in the U.S., Coinbase has long been a popular way to buy and trade cryptocurrencies in its home market. But with the struggles at Binance, the largest exchange in the world, Coinbase picked up useful market share during non-U.S. trading hours, according to a report from research firm Kaiko in late November 2023.
Binance is still open for business(Art illustration of a fictitious crypto trading room)
Shortly after Zhao’s plea deal, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reportedly said that the news amounted to ‘a vindication of the long-term strategy that we’ve taken to focus on compliance, make sure we were building a trusted company.’
Coinbase’s revenue and stock price are still way below where they were during the heyday of crypto trading in 2021, when retail investors were jumping into the market to buy all sorts of digital currencies, including gimmicks like Dogecoin.
But the business has stabilized following drastic cost-cutting measures starting last year and extending into early 2023.
Tesla recalled more than two million cars in December 2023 after the U.S. regulator found its driver assistance system, Autopilot, was partly defective, it was reported.
It follows a two-year investigation into crashes which occurred when the tech was in use. The recall applies to almost every Tesla sold in the U.S. since the Autopilot feature was launched in 2015.
The update happens automatically and does not require a visit to a dealership or garage but is still referred to by the U.S. regulator as a recall.
The UK Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency reportedly said it was not aware of any safety issues involving Teslas in the UK, noting that cars sold in the UK are not equipped with all of the same features as cars in the U.S.
Chinese company, Build Your Dreams (BYD), has moved another step closer to over-taking Tesla as the world’s biggest-selling manufacturer of electric vehicles.
The firm said on Monday it had sold a record 526,000 battery-only vehicles in the last three months of 2023, aided by more than a 70% surge in sales in December 2023.
Tesla is scheduled to release its latest quarterly vehicle production and delivery figures before Wall Street opens on Tuesday.
For the year, BYD said it had sold more than 3 million new energy vehicles (NEVs), which includes battery-only vehicles and hybrids. Almost 1.6 million of its total sales were battery-only vehicles, the firm said.
Industry analysts have forecast that Tesla sold around 483,000 electric vehicles in the last three months of 2023 and 1.82 million for the year as a whole.
