Interview with ProRata.ai's Josh Freeman (About Its "Ethical AI" Approach to Search)

In this episode, Peter Csathy interviews Josh Freeman, VP of Business Development of "must watch" company ProRata.ai, which sits at the center of the generative AI/content divide. The company has already raised $30 million at a valuation of $130 million. Its vision is to solve one of the most challenging and acrimonious issues at the center of generative AI — i.e., the use of content for training and sourcing purposes without consent, compensation and attribution. Its proprietary tech can do three critical things: (1) identify what it calls “proportionate attribution” to relevant content sources used for generative AI training purposes, based on each source’s relative contribution to the ultimate GenAI output/display; (2) enable reporting of that attribution/contribution; and (3) critically, enabling ongoing payments to the relevant rights-holders.

The company is going further — soon launching its own “Answer Engine” (that it plans to license to others) to compete directly with Perplexity, ChatGPT and others in AI search. But unlike the others, ProRata.ai says it does it all “ethically” — training its AI models on — and then outputting/displaying — only licensed media content. As an example, the company just announced a slate of major UK media licensing deals with the likes of the Guardian and Sky News. And here’s the fascinating part. The company’s business model is predicated on sharing 50/50 with rights-holders on any revenues generated by the LLMs, which means that rights-holders receive an ongoing share in all future revenues generated by the LLMs (not just single up-front licensing payments of the kind that have been negotiated so far).

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