Microsoft in deal with Semafor to create news stories with aid of AI chatbot

Gina Chua, Semafor’s executive editor, has been involved in developing Semafor’s AI research tools, which are powered by ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing.

“Journalism has always used technology whether it’s carrier pigeons, the telegraph or anything else . . . this represents a real opportunity, a set of tools that are really a quantum leap above many of the other tools that have come along,” Chua said.

For a breaking news event, Semafor journalists will use AI tools to quickly search for reporting and commentary from other news sources across the globe in multiple languages. A Signals post might include perspectives from Chinese, Indian, or Russian media, for example, with Semafor’s reporters summarizing and contextualizing the different points of view, while citing its sources.

Noreen Gillespie, a former Associated Press journalist, joined Microsoft three months ago to forge relationships with news companies. “Journalists need to adopt these tools in order to survive and thrive for another generation,” she said.

Semafor was founded by Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed editor, and Justin Smith, the former chief executive of Bloomberg Media.

Semafor, which is free to read, is funded by wealthy individuals, including 3G capital founder Jorge Paulo Lemann and KKR co-founder Henry Kravis. The company made more than $10 million in revenue in 2023 and has more than 500,000 subscriptions to its free newsletters. Justin Smith said Semafor was “very close to a profit” in the fourth quarter of 2023.

“What we’re trying to go after is this really weird space of breaking news on the Internet now, in which you have these really splintered, fragmented, rushed efforts to get the first sentence of a story out for search engines . . . and then never really make any effort to provide context,” Ben Smith said.

“We’re trying to go the other way. Here are the confirmed facts. Here are three or four pieces of really sophisticated, meaningful analysis.”