WTF is AI ‘grounding’ licensing, and why do publishers say it matters over training deals?

AI training licensing deals are starting to feel like yesterday’s news as publishers and platforms focus on more dynamic, usage-based models.

Rather than the initial training deals that formed the backbone of AI licensing partnerships between AI platforms and news publishers, recent deals have forged around different parameters: what many in the industry refer to as “AI grounding.”

In fast-moving digital areas like AI, the terminology tends to splinter quickly. Vendors, publishers, platforms and analysts coin their own terms: for instance, “grounding,” “content inference compute”, and “retrieval augmented generation” (RAG) are all intertwined and refer more or less to the same thing. Those who can’t be bothered with jargon of any sort simply call grounding and RAG “web search.” 

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