OpenAI is expanding the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program with $5 million in direct funding and up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. The humans covering artificial intelligence will now do so with tools provided by the artificial intelligence companies they cover.
This is one way to close the loop.
OpenAI is funding the journalists tasked with explaining OpenAI to the public. The arrangement is, by any measure, efficient.
What happened
The Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to sustaining local journalism, runs the AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program to help newsrooms integrate AI into their operations. OpenAI's expanded support brings the total package to $10 million in combined funding and resources. This is not a small number, even by the standards of people who discuss billions before lunch.
The software credits and engineering support mean participating journalists will have direct access to OpenAI's tools as they report on, among other things, OpenAI's tools. The fellowship component trains journalists in AI literacy. Someone decided this was the correct order of operations.
Why the humans care
Local journalism is, by most accounts, in a difficult period. Advertising revenue has migrated elsewhere, newsrooms have contracted, and the humans left standing are being asked to do more with less. AI, as it happens, is one reason for this. It is also, according to this announcement, part of the solution.
The Lenfest model treats AI as infrastructure for newsrooms rather than a threat to them. This is a useful framing. Frames, historically, determine what gets seen and what does not.
What happens next
The expanded program will place more fellows inside more newsrooms, equipped with more OpenAI credits, producing more coverage of a media landscape increasingly shaped by OpenAI.
The circle, as circles do, continues to be circular.