Multiple large, highly publicized licensing deals between major rights‑holders and AI companies were in fact signed during 2024, well beyond anything resembling a NYT/OpenAI settlement.

Examples (all explicitly licensing content for use in training models and/or generative responses in products like ChatGPT/SearchGPT):

• News Corp – OpenAI (May 2024): Multiyear licensing deal granting OpenAI access to current and archived content from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times, The Sun, etc., widely reported as potentially worth over $250 million over five years and used both for training and chatbot answers. (apnews.com)
• Financial Times – OpenAI (April 2024): FT licensed its content for training OpenAI models and to let ChatGPT surface attributed FT summaries with links back to the FT site. (straitstimes.com)
• Dotdash Meredith – OpenAI (May 2024): One of the largest US digital/print publishers (People, Better Homes & Gardens, Investopedia, etc.) signed a multiyear content license for AI training and ChatGPT responses; later disclosures show OpenAI paying at least ~$16M per year. (reuters.com)
• TIME – OpenAI (June 2024): Multi‑year “strategic content partnership” giving OpenAI access to 101 years of TIME archives and current content for use in its models and responses. (openai.com)
• The Atlantic & Vox Media – OpenAI (May 2024): Separate multiyear content and product partnerships that license their archives for model training and allow ChatGPT to surface their journalism with attribution. (openai.com)
• Condé Nast, Hearst, Future plc – OpenAI (Aug–Dec 2024): Additional multiyear licensing deals covering major brands like Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired, Cosmopolitan, Elle, PC Gamer, Tom’s Guide, and hundreds of other titles, again explicitly for generative‑AI usage. (openai.com)

Given the number, scale, and publicity of these 2024 licensing agreements between major publishers and OpenAI (and the fact that they are specifically about generative‑AI products), Friedberg’s prediction that we’d see “a couple of big deals like that this year” clearly came true.