Reddit has struck a rich deal with a large artificial intelligence company to let it use the social media network’s content to train its models, according to Bloomberg.
The deal is worth about $60 million on an annualized basis, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources. The report didn’t include the name of the AI company. The deal comes as Reddit gets closer to a long-awaited initial pubic offering.
A spokeswoman for Reddit declined to comment on the report.
The agreement will reportedly serve as model for future contracts with AI companies, which are eager to feed its systems any online content they can. Data has become an invaluable currency, with AI systems getting smarter and more accurate the more they ingest new information. There are already a number of potential deals between tech companies and media outlets to use their library of content.
But the Reddit situation is slightly different since all of that content is produced by users posting comments, images, GIFs, videos, and responses. Also, the platform addresses a myriad of different topics, and some of the conversations get weird. It’ll be interesting to see what an AI system learns from those posts.
As a reminder, Microsoft released an AI chatbot named Tay onto Twitter (now X) and it turned into a terrible, racist troll in less than a day.
It’s a reminder to be careful what you post, even if you’re doing it semi-anonymously through a screen name.
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