Reddit has signed an agreement with a major party to train AI algorithms using the popular platform’s data. The agreement is a step towards the legitimate use of data for training purposes.

Reddit has made a major deal with an unknown AI company worth $60 million a year. Bloomberg knows this. The deal is a licensing agreement that allows the company in question to train AI models based on the enormous amount of content on the Reddit platform.

abuse

Last year, there was a lot of controversy among Reddit’s users and especially its moderators when the company suddenly decided to protect its APIs. They were free since 2008 and both visitors and moderators relied on third-party tools, which in turn only worked thanks to these APIs. This change was made in response to abuse of the APIs. Organizations had taken advantage of free access to the data to train LLMs on Reddit data without permission.

At the time, Reddit even stated that its data was valuable and no longer wanted to give it away for free. In addition, an IPO of the service is planned soon. Now it appears that Reddit has correctly assessed the value of its platform. The license agreement shows that organizations are actually willing to pay millions to access the data.

Train sustainable LLMs

The deal comes at a time when organizations worldwide are looking for a more sustainable model for dealing with AI. After all, ChatGPT and its partners exist because they were trained without permission using data collected from across the internet. If ChatGPT knows the answer to a question about a current topic, it’s because the model has enlisted the work of journalists worldwide without asking.

Several European countries, including Italy, have already raised questions about copyright infringement and industrial-scale use of personal data, and the New York Times has filed a lawsuit. The agreement with Reddit is an important example of the value of data. On the one hand, the agreement shows that OpenAI and others have used millions of valuable data for free, and on the other hand, the agreement shows that a different model is possible: legitimate use and innovation in AI do not stand in the way of each other.

Large data set

Reddit is a very popular medium consisting of Subreddits around various topics where surfers can discuss topics within that topic. Think of frivolous topics such as little cats or computer games, but also of serious digital communities related to science or history, in which experts exchange insights with each other or with interested parties. Reddit has approximately 57 million daily active users and 812 million monthly active visitors. This is significantly less than on Facebook, for example, but the content on Reddit is usually of higher quality thanks to the moderated themes.