Artificial intelligence is not creating a sentient system anymore. It is more creating a system to do things that humans are normally good at and computers normally are not good at.
The Times understand that they are undergoing an initial loss to set a new standard in online news. They hope that other news sites will follow suit. If and after they do, you will not be able to get the story on any other web site. Subsequently, subscribers should increase and revenue should increase.
So, it's not surprising that they're not making a profit on this switch, because frankly, they're probably not trying to.
/earth: file system full.