Google just scored a jackpot deal with Reddit to use people’s posts and conversations to train its AI models. Redditors love spouting their opinions on literally everything, so that’s a goldmine of human chatter for Google’s bots to learn from.
The $60 million arrangement lets Google tap into Reddit’s bonanza of discussions on gadgets, travel tips, memes, news, and god knows what else. All that authentic dialog is like AI trainer catnip – perfect for helping algorithms get smarter and understand real human speech.
In return, Reddit gets access to some of Google’s fancy AI to improve its own site search and recommendation engines. So hopefully finding good subs and threads gets easier.
This partnership is a big move for Reddit since its communities revolve around user-created content. Moderators even blacked out the site before when they felt Reddit was exploiting that.
But Reddit promises that nothing data-driven that would change communities is happening here. The deal just opens its vault of conversations for Google’s algorithms while requiring Google to respect user privacy and deletions.
And for Google, getting exclusive access to Reddit’s trove of crowdsourced wisdom, jokes, product reviews, advice, and arguments is invaluable for its AI development, especially in conversational systems.
Rather than just dumping Reddit posts into its algorithmic black box though, Google says it mainly wants to funnel more of that community knowledge into its products.
So maybe soon your Google Search results could feature way more Reddit threads with travel tips, gadget feedback, local recommendations, and so on. Or Google Assistant may start answering some questions with upvoted perspectives from real Reddit posts.
So long story short – Google’s bots get smarter thanks to all us Reddit addicts yapping about stuff, while we might see our chatter appear more often as answers and recommendations from Google itself. Pretty slick exchange overall!
