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Reddit reportedly signed a $60 million deal with a “big AI company” to power its online communities Scraped for AI training dataAccording to bloomberg on Friday. The unnamed AI company will examine millions of posts on Reddit, and train a large language model on Reddit’s threads.
Reddit is reportedly IPO with valuation of $5 billion is being consideredDespite only bringing in $800 million in revenue last year. Reddit isn’t profitable, but its valuation is rich because its online communities provide an ideal training ground for AI models. However, licensing the thoughts and ideas of your user base does not always reciprocate well. Most popular subreddits went dark last year in protest After users raised issues with the company Charging for access to its application programming interface (API)First announced in April 2023.
Reddit’s reported deal with an “unnamed large AI company” is exactly what the platform was looking for. Big Tech is hungry for data, and it has replaced legacy news organizations, community forums, etc. Even the University of Michigan Only in content forms. These deals, though annoying to users, provide Reddit a path to profitability.
“The Reddit trove of data is really valuable,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. the new York Times In April. “But we don’t need to give away all that value to some of the world’s biggest companies for free.”
But when Reddit started charging for API access, it not only started charging larger companies, it also started charging smaller, independent researchers. This change made it more difficult for Reddit’s moderators to manage their communities, and some argued that it led to a worse experience for them. Reddit has 800 million monthly active users,
“We believe the longevity and success of this platform depends on preserving the rich ecosystem that has developed around it,” Reddit moderators said. mass letter Since last June. “The potential loss of these services due to pricing changes would have a significant impact on our ability to moderate efficiently, negatively impacting the experience of users in our communities.”
Reddit did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Apple was Search for $50 million AI deals with The New York Times, Condé Nast and other news publishers in December. Shutterstock also has Licensing your human-generated content to OpenAI For training on its models. Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have also become increasingly valuable in recent years, as they are now seen as content goldmines.
The platform also introduced advertising in recent years and made It is impossible for users to opt out of seeing advertiser content in 2023, As Reddit becomes a public company, users are increasingly concerned that management will damage the thriving community platform it has built.
There is also a big concern over how AI companies are licensing the data. Content platforms are signing million-dollar licensing agreements with AI companies, but the actual people creating this content are getting nothing. Meanwhile, AI threatens To replace content creators In the editorial, graphic design and film industries.
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