Have you ever posted or left a comment on Reddit? What you wrote will soon be used to train artificial intelligence models, according to Bloomberg.
The site earlier this year signed a deal "worth approximately $60 million on an annual basis," as it reportedly told potential investors ahead of the company's expected initial public offering (IPO).
Bloomberg didn't name the "major AI company" paying Reddit millions for access to its content, but their deal could apparently serve as a template for future contracts, which could mean more multimillion-dollar deals for the company .
The Reddit first announced that it was going to start charging companies for API access in April of last year.
At the time it said that pricing would be tiered so that even small customers could afford to pay. Companies need this API access to be able to train their chatbots with the posts and comments written over the past 18 years on subreddits with a wide variety of topics.
Reddit could go public as soon as next month at an initial valuation of $5 billion.
As Bloomberg notes, the site could convince investors to buy shares by showing them it can make a lot of money and increase its revenue through deals with artificial intelligence companies.
Companies behind generative AI technologies are constantly working to update their language models through various partnerships. OpenAI, for example, has already signed deals that give it the right to use articles from Business Insider and Politico to train its models. It is also in talks with several publishers, including CNN, Fox Corp and Time, Bloomberg reports.
OpenAI faces several lawsuits accusing it of using content without the express permission of copyright holders, including one filed by the New York Times in December.
