OpenAI And Google May Start Paying Reddit Soon; Here's Why

Reddit will begin charging users for use of its application programming interface, or API, in a first. Some of the most well-known chatbots on the market, including Google's Bard, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Microsoft's Bing Chat, reportedly received training using Reddit's API data. 

Despite the fact that it is well known that social media data was used to train the new chatbots based on huge language models, Reddit has become the first social media platform to charge these companies for its data.

Reddit's co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman provided an explanation of the value of data in an interview with the a media agency, stating, "More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation…There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all."

Huffman contends that using fresh and pertinent data is essential to getting the greatest outcomes from large language models. Reddit had more than 430 million active users as of 2019 who participated in more than 1.2 million niche communities.

According to the News agency, Reddit data was used in some capacity to train both ChatGPT and Bard. 

Large language models are allegedly trained using Reddit's API to download and analyse user data. Reddit data may be accessed by developers in a systematic and organized way due to the API.

Reddit now has a win-win partnership with Microsoft and Google, who use data scraped from Reddit to deliver reliable search results. Reddit gains as a result of rising in search results and gaining more users for its website.

Reddit has nothing to gain by allowing these businesses to access its data in light of the advent of huge language models-based chatbots. The Reddit corpus of data is quite valuable, according to Huffman. But we don't have to provide some of the biggest firms in the world with all of that value for nothing.

Although the site has not yet disclosed price for any third-party access, Huffman claims that developers who design applications that improve user experience would have access to Reddit's API data for free.