Reddit for a while now a discussion forum on a huge variety of topics. So Companies like Google and OpenAI use it to train their AIs.
About 57 million people visit Reddit every day to discuss related and unrelated topics. In recent years, Reddit's chat series has been a free educational aid for companies like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft. These companies are using Reddit conversations to develop giant artificial intelligence systems. Now Reddit asks to be paid for it.
The company said on Tuesday it plans to start charging companies for access to its API, a method through which outside companies can download and process more of the social network's conversations.
"Reddit's dataset is really valuable," said Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of Reddit, in an interview.
"But we shouldn't be giving away all that value to some of the biggest companies in the world for free."
The move marks one of the first major examples of a social network charging for access to chats it hosts for the purpose of developing AI systems such as ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular program.
These new AI systems could one day bring huge profits to the companies that develop them but not to Reddit. In fact, they could be used to create competitors – automated copies of Reddit conversations.
