Why Every AI Company Is Suddenly Obsessed With Reddit
The 29-year-old company’s data is worth hundreds of millions
AI companies are tripping over themselves to form content partnerships with a seemingly bizarre company: Reddit.
In February, Google announced a $60 million per year agreement with Reddit that allows Google to train its AI systems on Reddit’s data.
Last week, OpenAI announced a similar — and no doubt similarly lucrative — agreement.
Why are the world’s biggest and most powerful AI companies obsessed with an antiquated forum site that most traditional users regard as a biased and snark-filled cesspool?
It all comes down to how today’s large language models are trained. By a coincidence of how the site is set up, Reddit happens to generate the perfect training data for LLMs.
And the 29-year-old company is riding this wave of interest into a sea of enormous profitability — at a major cost to users.
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To continue advancing, Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini need to continue ingesting copious amounts of written language.
