Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman says that it’s platform’s content is among the world’s best training data for artificial intelligence — and an increasingly valuable commodity as the company intends to find its place in the AI “arms race.”
At the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Monday, Huffman gave everyone a glimpse into the future of online searching in our increasingly AI-powered world.
“AI has to come from somewhere,” he said. “The source of artificial intelligence is actual intelligence, and that’s what you find on Reddit.”
Basically they are letting these tech giants use Reddit posts to train their AI models. Google’s paying a hefty price for this access — a cool $60 million per year. OpenAI’s also getting a piece of the action, but the exact details of that deal are still under wraps.
“We think generally the internet is better when it’s open and interconnected,” Huffman said. “But we also need to make sure we aren’t just giving away the value of Reddit to the largest companies in the world for free.”
Reddit’s heritage is one of internet openness, Huffman said. But the company needs to find a way to maintain its values on terms that are still sustainable for the platform, he said.
“We’ve been getting scraped every which way,” Huffman said. “We’ve invested a lot in the last couple of years in locking that down, but it is an arms race.”
This article was first posted by me on ''medium.com.''