Bilderberg: Beyond the Meetings, Part 2—Secretive gatherings and their impact on media
Part 1 is here.One need not be overly suspicious to surmise that the annual Bilderberg Meetings—the seventieth such meeting, recently concluded in Madrid with a heavy artificial intelligence (AI) component among its attendees—function as an incubator for mega-trends that have a strong tendency to quickly spread and hardwire themselves into society. A major case in point: Just as the 2024 Bilderberg gathering came and went from 30 May to 2 June inclusive, headlines were, and still are, popping up to announce that OpenAI, a company owned by 2022–2023 Bilderberg Meetings attendee Sam Altman, is making scores of deals with media companies that will enable its ChatGPT bot to access the news content of those companies. Precisely what such partnerships will mean in terms of how news is formulated and presented, and how working journalists and the legal landscape may be affected, is not altogether clear—yet. But this much is clear: AI has been simmering at Bilderberg ever since the group’s 2015 Austria meeting, and nearly every meeting in the decade since then has featured some variation of AI and related technological matters—culminating in two AI topics topping the thirteen-item 2024 Bilderberg agenda: “State of AI” and “AI Safety.” Investor and Bilderberg Steering Committee member Peter Thiel, who helped fund Open AI’s initial development phase, was in Madrid for this year’s Bilderberg gathering,
as was Peter Lee, president of research for Microsoft—the company that chipped in a cool $1 billion when OpenAI in 2019 transitioned from a non-profit to a “capped-profit” for-profit entity, amid internal and external concerns that going into a for-profit mode would jeopardize the company’s solemn-sounding promises that OpenAI would be designed to benefit all of humanity and not become another plaything for the super-rich. This second installment of Bilderberg: Beyond the Meetings explores the basic “who and what” regarding certain big media outlets’ collaboration with OpenAI, with an emphasis on key Bilderberg connections and a glimpse at where this AI-news media “marriage” may be heading. (For AI-related breaking news items from time to time, tune in to this writer’s weekly UK Column News reports on Fridays). Some basic facts and observations about Altman:
Samuel Harris Altman
Samuel Harris Altman, 39, is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. Given the fact that AI has been discussed in some manner at Bilderberg for nearly ten years—and in view of the sudden explosion of AI on the world scene, flowing relentlessly into virtually every tributary of society—Altman and his AI-news venture should be closely monitored.
OpenAI and ChatGPT
OpenAI says it’s “an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.” ChatGPT is a chatbot and virtual assistant developed by OpenAI and launched on 30 November 2022. Based on large language models (LLMs), it enables users to refine and steer a seemingly genuine conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Notably, LLMs are a type of AI program that can perform natural language processing, using deep-learning algorithms and machine learning. LLMs are trained on large quantities of data, such as web pages, articles and books, to learn connections and patterns between words and phrases—thereby allowing them to mimic human intelligence and understand and generate human language.
Media Outlets Collaboration
Several of the news organizations entering into deals with Open AI are themselves Bilderberg participants. Whether a given news company is a Bilderberg regular or a newcomer, a taxpayer-funded corporation or a private enterprise, what these press attendees have in common is that they routinely leave the public trust at the door during Bilderberg’s ultra-exclusive and often elusively-located meetings and collaborate with a key planning, networking and deal-nurturing organization within the world power structure; yet these same media organizations attending Bilderberg still claim that they “speak truth to power,” which, under such collusive circumstances, is a total and utter impossibility.
For the record, those news organizations with more than a fleeting linkage to Bilderberg, and which have entered into deals with OpenAI, are:
- Germany-based Axel Springer, the parent company of the journal Politico and a Bilderberg perennial (Politico is a Capitol Hill news journal in the U.S. with a Brussels subsidiary) This writer’s previous installment of Bilderberg: Beyond the Meetings noted that Axel Springer is making a major effort to fully enter the U.S. media market;
- The Atlantic magazine, represented at Bilderberg annually by former Washington Post writer and historian of communism Anne Applebaum;
- The Financial Times, which not only has maintained a steady Bilderberg presence via its chief economics commentator Martin Wolf and several others, but also collaborates stateside with Chicago’s Pritzker Forum on Global Cities;
- Le Monde, the French newspaper of record that’s been represented at Bilderberg several times over the years; and
- Prisa Media, a Spanish media conglomerate that also has participated at Bilderberg.
Media Titans Integration with OpenAI
What follows is an outline of just some of the pertinent details about many of the media titans that are getting involved with OpenAI. When one realizes the complexity behind these and other legacy media outlets’ collaboration with Altman’s OpenAI—in terms of their ownership, reach and assets—it becomes clear that integrating OpenAI into the mass media ecosystem will create an omni-present phenomenon where it will be increasingly difficult to find any legacy news agency that is not heavily reliant on AI. On 29 May 2024, Reuters reported that OpenAI had “signed content and product partnerships” with The Atlantic magazine, a long-established Boston and New York journal steeped in statist-internationalist propaganda, and with Vox Media, a 13-year-old U.S.-based, largely digital mass media company headquartered in Washington D.C.
Such agreements provide OpenAI with access to news content and archives for the purpose of training OpenAI’s language learning models. Taking into account the fact that major media outlets have been hungry to get more than their usual meager share of internet-distribution revenues, Reuters noted:Such partnerships are not only crucial for the training of AI models; they also can be lucrative for news publishers, which have traditionally been denied a slice of profits internet giants earn for distributing their content.
And it’s no big surprise that the City of London-based Financial Times is among those signing deals with OpenAI. FT’s agreement with Altman’s company will license FT’s content “for the development of AI models and allow OpenAI’s ChatGPT to answer queries with summaries attributable to the newspaper,” as Reuters noted. OpenAI also has signed a deal with mass media conglomerate News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal.
News Corp. also owns News Corp Australia, which controls more than 150 major and smaller newspapers, weeklies and dailies across the whole of the Lucky Country. That represents almost total saturation, which raises a major concern: If large media conglomerates that already have massive news-dissemination abilities can saturate entire nations, or at least large regions within nations, with AI-connected news narratives—and assuming those narratives are based on the same worldview, regardless of whether you’re reading a newspaper or watching TV—then a highly monopolistic and monotonous news “product” may very well emerge, resulting in “reporting” that’s even more homogenized than now.
Future Implications
According to an impartial technology website, SearchEngineLand.com, the various news brands partnering with OpenAI “will likely gain an unfair advantage—in the form of featured content and citations—in ChatGPT,” especially if ChatGPT Search becomes a viable alternative to Google’s widely used search engine. Furthermore, that website, in a post dated 5 June 2024, explained how much OpenAI’s news partnerships have grown, while mentioning a newspaper association which, in turn, is linked to scores of media organizations and directors throughout the world:These partnerships will undoubtedly lead to greater discoverability in OpenAI products — think: featured content and citations (links) in ChatGPT. As we’ve seen from the Google-Reddit deal, brands with partnerships tend to get favorable placement, which is good news for those with such deals but bad news if you’re competing against them.
Those thirty news entities, besides the ones already cited in this article, also include the ubiquitous Associated Press (AP) wire service. AP’s reports are used in almost every imaginable news outlet, print and broadcast; others on the “List of 30” include (the list has some limited academic, governmental and news industry organizational connections):
As if that isn’t a sizable enough list of partnerships at this relatively early juncture in OpenAI’s collaboration with media entities and hi-tech companies, etc., the website Originality.AI h
