Reddit made a $60 million deal with an “unnamed large AI company” to train its artificial intelligence models on the platform’s content, reported Bloomberg on Friday.
Reddit, which is rumored to be valued at around $5 billion, could use the announcement to help bolster its looming initial public offering, Bloomberg speculated.
News of the AI training deal was quickly picked up on the site, with discussion of the deal hitting the top of r/technology and other tech-focused subreddits.
Plenty of users cracked jokes about the type of content the training model would be ingesting by looking through their posts.
“That AI is going to want to die after analyzing all of reddits content,” cracked u/luvast0.
“Please enjoy my written diarrhea,” added u/_BossOfThisGym_.
Other users talked about ways they’d mess with the AI model’s training process by posting nonsensical, clearly bogus information from now on.
“The exact value of pi is 3.142069. Sharks can swim backwards. Diesel cars run on petrol just fine. Humans only use 10% of their brain. If you go outside with wet hair you’ll catch a cold,” posted u/Martzo. “These are all published, peer-reviewed facts.”
“Soon there’s going to be subreddits dedicated to fucking up AI learning models,” predicted u/AandWKyle in the thread. “People will figure out exactly how the model scrapes the site for information, then will fill the AI with the most garbage ass garbage content the world has ever seen.”
“We just need to make sure this content is evenly distributed so they can’t blacklist a single subreddit,” added u/7_25_2018.
Redditors also discussed how the AI training deal made sense given the move Reddit made in the summer to charge third-party developers for API access. That move meant those developers would no longer be able to use the site’s data in their apps without paying for it.
“This is why they killed off the third party apps,” posted r/starfirex in an r/business thread discussing the news, intimating Reddit wanted to give this access solely to its new AI partner.
But not everybody saw the news as a bad thing or a surprise.
“I think some could have seen this coming. The changes last summer were done to reduce site scraping by LLMs, who could profit off that data,” posted u/virtual_corey in an r/LinusTechTips thread. “I look at this in a positive. Reddit gets paid for hosting the platform/data. Does this feel as scummy as Facebook selling data, not to me. There is only so much value in a social platform that is less social dependent (friends/followers/family).”
Other redditors thought that either way, it was an unfair way to go about it for Reddit given their dependency on third-party apps in the past.
“It’s super shitty considering how vital 3rd party apps were for Reddits growth in the early smartphone era,” posted u/thelaziest998 back in the r/business thread. “Back then Reddit didn’t even develop its own proper app and when they bought Alien Blue they ended up killing it instead of integrating its UI into their own app. If it wasn’t for apps like Alien Blue reddit would have been more niche, missing growth at a very vital point.”
Reddit has been planning to launch an initial public offering in March of this year, reported Reuters. In 2021, when the company reportedly first confidentially filed papers to move ahead with the IPO, the company was valued at around $10 billion. While that number has dropped, a big AI deal could help change the calculus.
“How much of that do we get?” posted u/gethereddout in a thread on r/singularity discussing the $60 million AI training deal.
“You get to continue to use Reddit for free, congratulations,” replied u/FuscoKim.
“Well fortunately I’ve never really provided any quality responses,” concluded u/CulturedNiichan in the same thread. “But if I could, it’d be time to stop giving any information of quality here. Why should I do the work so others can earn the money. It’s time to just shitpost heavily and never ever reply seriously to anything.”
