Reddit Wants To Get Paid for Helping To Teach Big AI Systems

Reddit has long been a forum for discussion on a huge variety of topics, and companies like Google and OpenAI have been using it in their A.I. projects. From a report: Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit's array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit's conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry's next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network's vast selection of person-to-person conversations. "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. "But we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free." The move marks one of the first significant examples of a social network's charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren't likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors -- automated duplicates to Reddit's conversations.

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