by BuzzFeed (BZFD) plans to lean heavily on AI-generated content.
News that sent shares of the company exploding, up as much as 150% in afternoon trading.
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 improve its quizzes .
“To deliver on the promise of our mission, we must build a stronger business foundation by executing a forward-looking strategy,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote to his associates.
“We need to look ahead and shift our business towards long-term trends to seize the opportunities that will arise in the eventual recovery,” Peretti continued, citing “creators” such as celebrities, athletes and influencers, along with artificial intelligence, as the future of digital media in 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 ~75% since the company went public via a SPAC combination in late 2021.
BuzzFeed’s Peretti told employees, “The creative process will become increasingly AI-enabled and technology-enabled.”
“If the past 15 years of the internet have been defined by algorithmic feeds that curate and recommend content, the next 15 years will be defined by AI and data that help create, personalize and animate the content itself,” said Peretti.
“Our industry will expand from AI-powered curation (feeds), to AI-powered creation (content). Creative people like us will play a key role in delivering the ideas, cultural currency, inspired prompts, IP and formats that come to life using the latest technologies.”
ChatGPT, the AI-based language processing bot, has sparked a flurry of conversation in recent weeks with entertainer will.i.am describing the tech innovation as “a great co-pilot for creatives” in a conversation with Yahoo Finance in Davos.
Meanwhile, tech giants such as Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) have received differing opinions with the former reportedly concerned about the release, while the latter is making a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company confirmed. earlier this week.
Microsoft, which said in its latest earnings report that it “wants to innovate for the future in the new AI era,” invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. But the latest investment comes as the tech giant faces a series of layoffs that hit its businesses ranging from cloud services to gaming.
In a statement, OpenAI said Microsoft’s investment will enable the company to develop and research AI that continues to become “more 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 alexandra.canal@yahoofinance.com
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