Meta Platforms Inc. has inked a licensing deal with Reuters that will give it access to the news agency’s content.

Axios revealed the agreement this morning. Meta and Reuters subsequently confirmed the news without disclosing the deal’s terms. 

Under the contract, Meta will make Reuters content accessible to its Meta AI chatbot for consumers. The chatbot will draw on the licensed articles to provide information about news and current events. Every prompt response generated in this manner is expected to include a link to the Reuters story on which it’s based.

The feature began rolling out in the U.S. today. According to Axios, Meta’s licensing agreement with Reuters is set to run for several years.

The dollar value of the deal was not disclosed. Additionally, it’s unclear whether the agreement will let Meta use the licensed content to train Llama, the series of open-source large language models that powers Meta AI.

The most advanced LLM in the lineup, Llama 3.1 405B, can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4o at some tasks. Meta credits the model’s performance partly to the fact it was trained on more data than its predecessor.

Going forward, content from publishers could become more important to Meta’s AI training efforts. Since the start of the year, rival artificial intelligence providers have inked content licensing deals with dozens of newspapers. At least some of those agreements, such as OpenAI’s April deal with the Financial Times, permit the use of articles for AI training.

The amount of training data available to an LLM directly influences the quality of its responses. As rivals such as OpenAI increasingly incorporate content from publishers into their training datasets, Meta may seek to do the same to ensure its Llama models can keep up with the competition. 

Meta AI, the chatbot that the Llama series powers, is available in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. It’s also accessible to users of the smart glasses that the company launched with Ray-Ban parent Luxottica Group S.p.A last year. Until now, Meta AI mainly focused on tasks such as generating shopping suggestions and helping users solve math problems.

Meta has added several new features to the chatbot since its initial debut last year. In April, against the backdrop of an update to the Llama model series, Meta AI received an enhanced image generation capability. Meta also released a second new feature that allows users to turn the images they generate with the chatbot into GIFs.

As the company continues enhancing Meta AI, it may ink licensing deals with more publishers to expand the amount of content the chatbot can make available to users. Meta could potentially also turn to other data sources. Earlier this year, Google LLC inked licensing deals with Reddit Inc. and Stack Overflow to make posts from their respective forum platforms available to its AI models. 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons