Companies developing artificial intelligence need quality data to train their models. Google enlisted the support of the popular social network Reddit in this.
Last week it became known that the social media platform Reddit had entered into a deal with an unknown player in the artificial intelligence market. Bloomberg reported that the deal would allow the company to use data from the platform to train artificial intelligence models. Now Reuters found out that this partner was Google, and the value of the deal was about 60 million dollars a year.
Reddit is gearing up for an IPO and is looking to turn a profit ahead of it, no easy task given its fierce competition for ad revenue from TikTok and Meta. Last year, Reddit said it would charge companies to access its API, and the deal with Google was the first high-profile deal to do so.
As part of the deal, Reddit will reportedly make content published on the platform available to Google, which will use it to train its own AI models. Neither Reddit nor Google have officially commented on news of the deal.
Let's remind that Reddit has existed since 2005. The platform works as a news aggregator and web forum. Here, users can share images, videos, links, test messages and rate each other's content by upvoting or downvoting. According to Similarweb, the Reddit site holds the 16th place in the list of the 20 most visited sites in the world.
OpenAI, the startup behind the text generation tool ChatGPT, was previously reported to be in talks with news publishers to use their content to train its models. In December, it became known that OpenAI signed a contract with the German media giant Axel Springer SE worth tens of millions of dollars. At the same time, AI developers have already faced numerous copyright infringement lawsuits. One of these was initiated by The New York Times.
The training of AI models on posts and comments in social networks also has great potential. The day before, CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the creation of powerful artificial intelligence. His statement raised concerns about the potential use of content from Facebook and Instagram to do so.