Reddit to sell user content in new AI training deal: Report

AI training on social medi: Reddit Inc. has inked a pact with an unnamed AI company which will give access to its content to train its artificial intelligence models, as per reports.

The development comes ahead of Reddit’s IPO launch in March at a valuation of $5 billion, as reported by Reuters in January.

Reddit has over a decade of user content on its platform. It was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian.

The social media platform’s content will be used by the AI company for its models, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. 

Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, informed prospective investors in its public offering about a deal it had signed, which is valued at about $60 million on an annualised basis earlier this year, as per the sources. The agreement could also change, as per the report.

It is predicted that the agreement could be a model for future contracts of a similar nature, one of the people was quoted as saying.

A majority of the companies in artificial intelligence (AI) have been training their data on the open web without any permission. This has led to enterprises having a cautious and firm approach to data use.
While ChatGPT maker OpenAI is offering a $5 million deal to news publishers, Apple is seeking multi-year deals with news companies at an estimate of $50 million.

In October, it was reported that Reddit had threatened to cut off Google and Bing’s search crawlers in the absence of a training data deal with AI companies.   

Reddit has been filing for IPO after three years, and the current valuation is over halfway down from the previous valuation of $10–$15 billion. The listing was stalled due to a market downturn.