When it comes to internet conversations — regardless of subject matter — Reddit is typically the place to be. Every day, roughly 57 million people visit the site to talk about everything from online marketing and video games to celebrities.
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As a company, Reddit is well aware of how popular it has become. It’s also aware that its channels are a free source of content for companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI. These companies, among others, have been using Reddit’s content to develop large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are changing the world.
Along with major players like ChatGPT parent company OpenAI, which raised $10 billion from Microsoft Corp., startups such as RAD AI are making moves through Reddit. RAD AI is uses Reddit as an API partner to tap into “authetic communication and gain insight that would be difficult to obtain through other means.” RAD AI combines this authentic human interaction with the likes of generative AI to create their first of its kind “AI marketing platform built to understand emotion.”
Reddit Says, ‘Show Me The Money’
Rather than continue to provide free content, Reddit is taking steps toward getting paid. The company announced its plan to charge companies for access to its application programming interface (API), which provides them the ability to download and process its massive collection of conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Reddit Founder and CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with The New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
With this decision, Reddit is taking a big step forward on behalf of social networks that are providing AI companies, like RAD AI, access to content to develop AI systems. These systems have the potential to change the business landscape and generate big-time revenue and could spurn competitors.
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Reddit Isn’t Alone
While this is a big move by Reddit, it’s not the first company to take action to protect its content. Shutterstock, the popular image hosting service, recently sold image data to OpenAI to use in the development of DALL-E, a solution for turning text-based prompts into graphics.
With such early success, it goes without saying that AI companies will quickly continue down the development path. And in many ways, that means finding new ways to scrape data.
Reddit has yet to announce how much it will charge for API access but intends to release this information in the near future. This should provide a better idea of how much Reddit values its content and the price that AI companies are willing to pay.
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