Reddit gives OpenAI access to its wealth of posts

OpenAI will have access to Reddit data to train its artificial intelligence models and will put its technology to work on the popular discussion platform, the companies said Thursday.

Reddit, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year, has been looking to capitalize on the value of exchanges across its various discussion groups as it seeks to improve revenue.

Financial details of the partnership between the San Francisco-based technology companies were not disclosed. Reddit relies on advertising for revenue.

“Reddit has become one of the Internet’s largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always-up-to-date human conversation about anything and everything,” Reddit Chief Executive Steve Huffman said in a joint statement.

“Adding it to ChatGPT continues our belief in a connected Internet, helps people find more of what they’re looking for, and helps new audiences find communities on Reddit.”

OpenAI will access Reddit data in real time, enhancing that content in ChatGPT and leveraging the social media platform’s tools, the companies said.

Reddit suffered a major outage in December when the site’s communities protested new fees charged to provide access to developers.

The dispute was a consequence of the recent artificial intelligence revolution, with Huffman reluctant to allow companies that build AI chatbots like ChatGPT free access to the site to improve their large-language models.

“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do so, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” Huffman wrote in a Reddit post at the time.

Reddit essentially works through thousands of “subreddits” – forums on a dizzying array of topics moderated by their creators.

The biggest subreddits have tens of millions of subscribers, including r/funny, r/games, and r/music.

Some habits on Reddit have become social media standards, including AMAs, or Ask Me Anything sessions, where users can ask an interviewee anything during a set period of time.

OpenAI noted in the statement that Chief Executive Sam Altman is a shareholder in Reddit.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)