With Twitter (X) training its own poorly-named AI on user data, and Meta doing the same thing with its yet-to-be-unveiled bot, surely Reddit wouldn’t be left behind, right? Well, dear reader, while Reddit may not be making an AI (yet), it has reportedly seen the value in selling your posts.
The social media company told investors, as reported by Bloomberg which connected with sources familiar with the matter, that it had signed a $US60 million annualised agreement with a large AI company. Which AI company it is remains a mystery, however. This deal supposedly means that, whichever company it is, has a license to grab and use your data to add to an AI’s large language model, or LLM. Whether or not there are exclusions from the deal, including direct messages, images, or private subreddits, it was not revealed, but we have reached out to Reddit for clarification.
AI is extremely hungry for data and information (along with energy). Adding new information and datasets into AI LLM’s increases what the AI can pull from, and therefore generate. As such, it makes sense that Reddit would sell its swathes of data for big money.
Recently, Reddit (the company) announced that it was moving to an initial public offering (an IPO), which would see shares in the company available on the stock market for the first time. This AI data announcement was supposedly made to prospective investors in the IPO, and would have definitely been made to show off just how valuable Reddit could be to invest in.
However, Reddit (the social media site) is a very interesting part of the web, populated by users who don’t typically get along with how the platform is being managed. Last year’s ‘Reddit Blackout’, in protest of API changes that killed certain third-party applications that were reliant on Reddit access, saw just what lengths the huge internet community would go to, to be heard. The changes stuck, however, and had heavy implications for what we’re seeing now.
It’ll be interesting to see how Reddit changes as it approaches an IPO, and just what part it plays in big tech’s embrace of generative AI.
Image: Reddit