Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content::Reddit has reportedly made a deal with an unnamed AI company to allow access to its platform’s content for the purposes of AI model training.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reddit will let “an unnamed large AI company” have access to its user-generated content platform in a new licensing deal, according to Bloomberg yesterday.
The deal, “worth about $60 million on an annualized basis,” the outlet writes, could still change as the company’s plans to go public are still in the works.
The news also follows an October story that Reddit had threatened to cut off Google and Bing’s search crawlers if it couldn’t make a training data deal with AI companies.
Last year, it successfully stonewalled its way out of the biggest protest in its history after changes to its third-party API access pricing caused developers of the most popular Reddit apps to shut down.
As Bloomberg writes, Reddit’s year-over-year revenue was up by 20 percent by the end of 2023, but it was still $200 million shy of a $1 billion target it had set two years prior.
The company was reportedly advised to seek a $5 billion valuation when it opens up for public investment, which is expected to happen in March.
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 49%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’d be very surprised if people weren’t already scraping Reddit for this.
it’s all but guaranteed. Reminds me of this Computerphile video: https://youtu.be/WO2X3oZEJOA?t=874 TL;DW: there were “glitch tokens” in GPT (and therefore ChatGPT) which undeniably came from Reddit usernames.
Note, there’s no proof that these reddit usernames were in the training data (and there’s even reasons to assume that they weren’t, watch the video for context) but there’s no doubt that OpenAI already had scraped reddit data at some point prior to training, probably mixed in with all the rest of their text data. I see no reason to assume they completely removed all reddit text before training. The video suggest reasons and evidence that they removed certain subreddits, not all of reddit.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/WO2X3oZEJOA?t=874
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I mean, there’s /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 that’s been running for years… Although that one was at least hilarious to read because at that stage the AI was in the sweet spot of being simultaneously coherent while making total lapses in logic.
That was the real reason for the API changes last year, apps just got caught in the crossfire.
Why is there nothing on reddit about this lol
FUCK REDDIT! FUCK U/SPEZ! The Red-exit shall endure, VIVA LA LEMMY!!
They say it’s $60 million on an annualized basis. I wonder who’d pay that, given that you can probably scrape it for free.
Maybe it’s the AI act in the EU. That might cause trouble in that regard. The US is seeing a lot of rent-seeker PR, too, of course. That might cause some to hedge their bets.
Maybe some people had not realized that yet, but limiting fair use does not just benefit the traditional media corporations but also the likes of Reddit, Facebook, Apple, etc. Making “robots.txt” legally binding would only benefit the tech companies.
