Reddit struck a deal with OpenAI

With the new deal, Reddit will get access to OpenAI's technology for building artificial intelligence features, and OpenAI will get access to Reddit posts, which can be a real treasure trove for learning ChatGPT.

OpenAI has signed an agreement to access Reddit's API content in real time, meaning it can display discussions from the site in ChatGPT and other new products. It's a similar deal to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year, reportedly worth $60 million.

The deal will also "enable Reddit to introduce new AI-powered features for both Redditors and moderators," as well as use OpenAI's large-scale language models to build apps.

Reddit users staged a mass revolt last year because they disagreed with how Reddit's leadership was managing the platform, so it will be interesting to see how they react to the latest deal. More than 7,000 sub-groups on Reddit temporarily closed their doors in June 2023, after users protested Reddit's changes in user interface pricing.

Stack Overflow and OpenAI have also recently entered into an agreement. In protest, users wanted to delete their most visited answers because they did not want them to be used to learn large language models. The platform stopped their attempt and also blocked the users. The latter criticized the platform for not giving them the opportunity to decide whether to participate in it or not.

Back to Reddit and Opan AI. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but Reddit shares jumped 10 percent after the deal was revealed.

"Reddit has become one of the Internet's largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always relevant human conversations about anything and anyone. Joining ChatGPT validates our belief in a connected internet, helping people find more of what they're looking for, and helping new audiences find community on Reddit,” said Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit.

That's quite a shift for a company that has historically been averse to companies wanting to comb its forums for data usage. Way back, they even threatened Google to block their browsers if they continued to use their users' data. In the ChatGPT sub-group, moderators were criticized for using the ChatGPT logo, allegedly infringing OpenAI's copyright.

As always, when there is talk of artificial intelligence, there are already concerns about authorship. In this case, who owns all this data? User or platform?