The Download: the future of music AI, and climate tech funding

Just two days later, the Financial Times reported that YouTube is pursuing a comparatively above-board approach. Rather than training AI music models on secret data sets, the company is reportedly offering unspecified lump sums to top record labels in exchange for licenses to use their catalogs for training data. While the ground here is moving fast, none of these moves should be all that surprising: litigious training-data battles have become something like a rite of passage for generative AI companies. The trend has led many to pay for licensing deals while the cases unfold. But the stakes of a fight over training data for AI music are different--and arguably even higher.