OpenAI has recently signed a huge deal with the social media giant Reddit to access real-time content from Reddit’s API to train its AI. It’s an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million.
The deal will also allow Reddit to bring new AI-powered features for Redditors and mods as well as use OpenAi’s large models to build applications. OpenAI has also signed up to become an advertising partner on Reddit.
Redditors have been pretty vocal about this deal and about how Reddit’s executives managed the platform before, and it remains to be seen how they’ll react to this announcement. More than 7,000 subreddits went dark in June 2023 after users protested Reddit’s changes to its API pricing. Recently, following news of a partnership between OpenAI and the programming messaging board Stack Overflow, people were suspended after trying to delete their posts.
No financial terms were revealed in the blog post announcing the arrangement, and neither company mentioned training data, either.
The company has not always been friendly toward companies scraping its data to train AI models. It threatened to block Google web crawlers from accessing the site. OpenAI also reportedly told the moderators of the subreddit r/ChatGPT that they violated OpenAI’s copyright by using the ChatGPT logo as a display photo.
