by BuzzFeed (BZFD) is planning to lean heavily on AI-generated content.
News that sent shares of the company exploding, surging as much as 150% in afternoon trade.
According to an internal memo obtained by Yahoo Finance and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the company plans to use ChatGPT creator OpenAI to generate and personalize some of its content and enhance its quizzes.
“To deliver on our mission promise, we must build a stronger business foundation by executing a forward-thinking strategy,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote to employees.
“We need to look ahead and steer our business towards longer-term trends to capture the opportunities that will come in the eventual recovery,” Peretti continued, citing “creators” such as celebrities, athletes and influencers, along with artificial intelligence, as the future. of digital media over the next three years.
In response to that effort, the Journal reported this week that Facebook parent company Meta (META) plans to pay BuzzFeed millions of dollars to bring more creators to the social media giant’s platforms.
BuzzFeed shares have lost about 75% since the company went public via a SPAC combination in late 2021.
BuzzFeed’s Peretti told employees that “the creative process will become increasingly AI-assisted and technology-enabled.”
“If the last 15 years of the internet were defined by algorithmic feeds that curate and recommend content, the next 15 years will be defined by artificial intelligence and data that help create, personalize and animate content,” Peretti said. .
“Our industry will expand beyond AI-powered curation (feed), to AI-powered creation (content). Creative humans like us will play a key role by providing the ideas, cultural currency, suggestions inspired, the IP and formats that come to life using the latest technologies”.
ChatGPT, the AI-powered speech processing bot, has caused a flurry of conversations in recent weeks with entertainer will.i.am describing tech innovation as “a great co-pilot for creatives” in a conversation with Yahoo Finance in Davos.
Meanwhile, tech giants like Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) have taken differing views with the former worried about the release, while the latter is making a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company confirmed early on. of this week.
Microsoft, which said it wants to “innovate for the future in the new age of AI” in its latest earnings report, invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. But the latest investment comes as the tech giant grapples with a series of layoffs that has hit its businesses ranging from cloud services to gaming.
In a statement, OpenAI said Microsoft’s investment will enable it to develop and research artificial intelligence that is increasingly “secure, useful and powerful.”
With additional reporting by Daniel Howley.
Alexandra is a Senior Entertainment and Media Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @alliecanal8193 and email her at [email protected]
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