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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I don't trust that they'll be able to make back that $40M.

This feels very much like a news agency getting into crypto or launching its own NFT line.

Or IBM selling Watson.

Or Mozilla chasing every which thing.

They're not stakeholders in the future of work. They're just wanting to stay relevant and pattern matching against what they see.

Reuters is too important for this.

If they were trying to use this as a narrative affront to OpenAI and Anthropic, maybe, but this is Reuters, not a deeply political organization seeking to land gotchas against big tech.

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No it's just a value add to their existing data products and a moat against the big n LLM companies. The "news" part of the business is relatively small compared to everything else the do.

Like how Bloomberg does news but its far from their only or primary product. TR covers a different surface of data products than Bloomberg but it's a decent comparison.

Reuters, the news agency, is only roughly 10% of TR's revenue. They're still a pretty big player in Legal and Tax.

Keep in mind line items can be deceptive. e.g. “Corporates” can mean “money we make from selling access to individual’s biometric data to the government.”

https://ir.thomsonreuters.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

I doubt the point is to "make the money back".

It's likely split between two goals:

1. Marketing and expressing to their customers that they are not falling behind, and

2. Insulating themselves from frontier labs jacking up prices, nerfing the models they depend on, or otherwise unexpected changes in behavior.

I think the main goal is #2. Thomson Reuters might be a $40B company, but.... at this point it's not clear that that holds any weight in terms of not being fucked over by 2 companies aiming for $2t+ IPO valuations.

Edit: On second thought, there is probably a #3 too. They can serve inference for their own models significantly cheaper than frontier lab rates (assuming they're capturing continuous use of their hardware). I still think #2 is the primary goal.

> I think the main goal is #2. Thomson Reuters might be a $40B company, but.... at this point it's not clear that that holds any weight in terms of not being fucked over by 2 companies aiming for $2t+ IPO valuations.

It's exactly the same sorta thinking re; Microsoft potentially fucking over the PC videogames industry that Valve used to justify the zillions of dollars and countless man-hours put into their big push for Linux gaming rather than tie themselves to a single proprietary company that could try to kick them out of the gaming industry. So far it's going pretty well for them. Depending on how they play their cards, this could also work out really well for Thomson Reuters as well.

I doubt that 40 million are a lot of money for TR.

I also doubt that R&D spending having to "make back" directly is a winning strategy.

Yeah, if R&D ROI was the main criteria to evaluate a company decision the AI labs wouldn’t be valued the way they are!

I know you're being facetious, but I genuinely think Thomson Reuters should be investing in NFTs as much as it is in AI. NFTs (while some of the shine has admittedly worn off) are an emerging infrastructure for digitally native ownership, and that's precisely the sort of institutional problem Thomson Reuters is positioned to solve (think tax records, medical records, etc).

People in tech suddenly tossing NFTs to the side because AI came along makes no sense to me. HN should be as bullish on NFTs now as it was in 2021. Jumping on to the AI train and acting like NFTs are bad now makes us seem flippant.

Tbf plenty of us were “acting” like NFTs were bad then too.

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