BuzzFeed (BZFD) is planning to heavily lean on AI-generated content.
News that sent shares of the company exploding higher, rising as much as 150% in afternoon trade.
According to an internal memo obtained by Yahoo Finance, and first reported by The Wall Street Journal, the company plans to utilize ChatGPT creator OpenAI to generate and personalize some of its content and enhance its quizzes.
"To fulfill the promise of our mission, we need to build a stronger business foundation by executing a forward-looking strategy," BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote to employees.
"We must look ahead and shift our business towards longer term trends in order to seize the opportunities that will come in the eventual recovery," Peretti continued, citing "creators" like celebrities, athletes, and influencers, along with artificial intelligence, as the future of digital media over the next three years.
In response to that effort, the Journal reported this week Facebook parent company Meta (META) plans to pay BuzzFeed millions of dollars to bring more creators to the social media giant's platforms.
BuzzFeed stock has lost ~75% since the company went public via a SPAC combination in late 2021.
BuzzFeed's Peretti told employees, "the creative process will increasingly become AI-assisted 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 helping create, personalize, and animate the content itself," Peretti said.
"Our industry will expand beyond AI-powered curation (feeds), to AI-powered creation (content). Creative humans like us will play a key role providing the ideas, cultural currency, inspired prompts, IP, and formats that come to life using the newest technologies."
ChatGPT, the AI-based language processing bot, has caused a frenzy of conversations over the past several weeks with entertainer will.i.am describing the technological innovation as "a great co-pilot for creatives" in a conversation with Yahoo Finance at Davos.
Meanwhile, tech giants like Alphabet's Google (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) have taken on varying 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 it wants to "innovate for the future in the new era of AI," invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. But the latest investment comes as the tech giant is contending with a round of layoffs that struck its businesses ranging from cloud services to gaming.
In a statement, OpenAI said Microsoft’s investment will enable it to develop and research AI that is increasingly “safe, 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 [email protected]
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