Reddit is an 18-year-old social media platform where users can post, comment, and exchange various topics. The data on conversations between these users is rich and a valuable resource for companies looking to train AI chatbots. However, Reddit no longer intends to provide this data for free, and the company has decided to charge third parties to use its application programming interface (API).
Reddit’s API is a tool that allows external programs to access and manipulate Reddit data. Many large companies, such as Google and OpenAI, use Reddit’s API to train their large language models (LLM), that is, artificial intelligence systems that can understand and generate natural language. These systems require massive amounts of data to learn the patterns of human language and behaviour, and Reddit provides a perfect library of material.
Reddit believes that the data it owns is too valuable to give away to some of the world’s largest companies for free. As such, it’s launching a “new premium access point” aimed at third parties who want to use its API to train AI chatbots. Reddit has not yet announced the specific charging standards but said that it will be divided into different levels, according to the size and needs of users. Reddit also said that this move will not affect those who use its API to create and maintain content moderation tools and will provide them with dedicated iOS and Android apps that will have mod logs, rule management tools, mod Group queue information and other functions.
Why is Reddit making such a change at this time? It is noticed that there are rumours that Reddit intends to go public later this year. Creating a new revenue stream is a great move ahead of an IPO.
