Raise your hand if you’ve ever posted or commented on Reddit! Well, your words may soon be helping train artificial intelligence models, according to a new Bloomberg report. Apparently Reddit signed a lucrative $60 million annual deal with a “large AI company” earlier this year.
While Bloomberg didn’t name the company, you can bet it’s likely one of the major players looking to improve their natural language AI systems. We’re talking the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others who are hungry for large datasets of human writing to better understand language.
This API access deal could set a precedent for Reddit to ink more big money partnerships as it prepares to go public next month with an estimated $5 billion valuation. With subreddits covering every topic imaginable over the past 18 years, Reddit offers a goldmine of conversational data. No wonder AI companies are willing to shell out millions for it!
However, this news may unsettle Reddit users who never consented to have their casual posts used to develop potentially powerful AI models. It also risks backlash from smaller third-party Reddit app developers who rely on the same APIs. Thousands of subreddits went dark last year when API changes caused stability issues.
And legal issues loom as well – OpenAI already faces multiple lawsuits from news publishers like the New York Times alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted content for model training. OpenAI claims productive licensing conversations were underway, so the suits took them by surprise.
In any case, the AI data feeding frenzy continues. As companies fine-tune ever-larger language models, the demand for diverse human text data grows. Ethical concerns aside, from a business perspective this trend shows no signs of slowing down. So Reddit may be sitting on a goldmine, but users and developers alike will watch carefully at how these deals shake out.
