Amazon Strikes A.I. Licensing Deal With The New York Times - 1

Image by Marco Lenti, from Unsplash

  • Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
  • Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

  • The New York Times licensed its content to Amazon for A.I. use.
  • The deal includes news, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic content.
  • Amazon may use Times content in Alexa and A.I. model training.

In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using its articles to train chatbots without permission. OpenAI and Microsoft denied wrongdoing. While that lawsuit continues, this new partnership signals a different approach.

“This deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” said Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of The Times. “It aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights.”

Deepseek Releases Update To Its AI Reasoning Model R1 - 2

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Deepseek Releases Update To Its AI Reasoning Model R1

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
  • Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

The AI startup DeepSeek released the latest update to its reasoning AI model, R1, on the Hugging Face platform on Thursday. The update, R1-0528, was launched without an official announcement and with only a few details provided.

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

  • DeepSeek released a new update for its R1 model, including an MIT license.
  • R1-0528 has performed almost as well as frontier models such as o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.
  • The latest version offers a reduced hallucination rate.

According to TechCrunch , the Chinese company shared a post on the social media platform WeChat on Wednesday, informing followers about the recent development. The update includes a “minor” upgrade: the adoption of a permissive MIT license, which allows the model to be used commercially.

“In the latest update, DeepSeek R1 has significantly improved its depth of reasoning and inference capabilities by leveraging increased computational resources and introducing algorithmic optimization mechanisms during post-training,” states the document shared by DeekSeek on Hugging Face. “Its overall performance is now approaching that of leading models, such as o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.”

In the graphics of the benchmark test results, DeepSeek R1-0528 performs just as good—or better—than similar competitive models. In the AIME 2025 benchmark, DeepSeek R1-0528 reached an 87.5 score, below the OpenAI o3 model with 88.9 points, but better than Gemini-2.5 Pro 0506, Qwen3-235B, and its own previous version, DeepSeek-R1.

“Beyond its improved reasoning capabilities, this version also offers a reduced hallucination rate, enhanced support for function calling, and a better experience for vibe coding,” states the document.

Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, spread the news of the R1 update on the social media platform X.. “Just a few minutes later & the updated R1 is already available on some of our inference partners,” wrote Delangue. “All on the model page – beautiful!” Multiple users shared their interest in the latest version of R1.

DeepSeek was recently involved in a data breach case , in which its database was exposed, offering access to third parties to around 1 million logs, API keys, and chat history. The vulnerability has already been handled by DeepSeek.