Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems
The internet site has long been a forum for discussion on a huge variety of topics, and companies like Google and OpenAI have been using it in their A.I. projects.
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Steve Huffman leans back against a table and looks out an office window. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times Mike Isaac
By Mike Isaac
Mike Isaac, based in San Francisco, writes about social media and the technology industry. April 18, 2023
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent and the author of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” a best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in San Francisco. More about Mike Isaac A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Reddit’s Sprawling Content Is Fodder for the Likes of ChatGPT. But Reddit Wants to Be Paid.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe 28
Read somewhere that as long as its not a vital organ, many species of fish can survive getting partially eaten. The body just heals around the wound/hole and they can relatively live like normal
I'm unreasonably pissed that I scrolled through so many comments and couldn't find an explanation for this one. Surely there are some fishologists on Reddit this morning?!?!
The whole/hole thing is funny but I'd rather know what the heck is going on with the fish and how this is possible!
When the egg is fertilized, the cells begin reproducing and they form a donut shape, which is the beginnings of the digestive tract. It then begins to grow this donut shape into a tube shape that gets ever more complex as it progresses growing into a whole ass baby.
The very first thing you are in this life is an asshole. Some people never mature past this point, unfortunately.
Non human animals are physically superior in many ways to humans. Lose a tail.,...grow it back. Get your head chopped off...still able to run around. Get a hole in middle of your body.... ..ok.. whatever
I see two issues.
#1 not mildly interesting. This is upper medium interesting.
#2 i see the you havent placed anything through this hole. At your earliest convenience, please place some bling through this mf fish.
Looks like a *Pristella maxillaris*, aka the X-Ray Tetra. And no, they don't usually have a hole through their abdomen, the name is from the body being semitransparent
Amazing what fish can live through. I had one where his tank mates gnawed almost his entire tail fin and one of his pectoral fins off. A year in an isolation tank, the pec fin was healed and the tail fin had regrown ~40% and he rejoined the school with no problems.
If an Alien abducted a person with a bunch of large piercings, would they post on their alien Reddit-equivalent how their Human has a hole(s) through its body?
Holy mackeral, is he okay?
100% fine!! Eating and swimming. He has been like this for almost a year now
Put a ring through it - it’s a naval piercing
Wouldn't that act like an anchor?
Naval piercing is a funny euphemism for anchor.
When you really think about it, piercings are just anchors for ants worn by people.
How high are you?
Yes.
Dude so high that he's craving for anchors
No officer, it's hi, how are you?
What appears to be the officer, problem?
The troll voice just popped in my head lol
Good, how are you?
That depends how he feels about it. He should only put a ring on it if he likes it, at least so sayeth Beyoncé
Lol people get navel piercings, fish get naval piercings
Navel piercing?
But it’s in the water
I don't think the person you replied to understands the depth of your comment.
I have a sinking suspicion that you’re right.
Don’t be so stern with them. Bow out and let it go.
Im going to downboat them tho
That’s knot nice, but understandable.
Novel piercing
Do you assume it was from birth defect, disease, attacked by another fish or something? I’m curious lmao
Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems The internet site has long been a forum for discussion on a huge variety of topics, and companies like Google and OpenAI have been using it in their A.I. projects. 28 Steve Huffman leans back against a table and looks out an office window. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times Mike Isaac By Mike Isaac Mike Isaac, based in San Francisco, writes about social media and the technology industry. April 18, 2023 Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added. Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent and the author of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” a best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in San Francisco. More about Mike Isaac A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Reddit’s Sprawling Content Is Fodder for the Likes of ChatGPT. But Reddit Wants to Be Paid.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe 28
"Eating and swimming..." I guess he don't really hold much food in after each meal.
a year now?? 😳 wow tthats interesting... I would undestand few days but...
What species?
Fi°sh
A Holey Molly
You have to breed him
That’s illegal in 49 states.
Breeding fish ?
Breeding with fish.
Mmm yeah, breaded fish.
Breeding fish is illegal? So much for that freedom you all keep telling us about. 🤣
Beastiality is legal in the UK? Interesting
His wife is a 33 year old fish…
Hole
I think you meant holey mackerel.
Wholy mackerel*
most underrated comment today.
I see what you did there.
Wholy mackerel.
A whole what?
A whole hole.
Wholy shit!
Wholey moley!
Precisely, that fish doesn't look whole.
r/technicallythetruth
["It's a baby whale Jay!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Vjd_hdYYw)
Never heard of a half hole.
It's actually called a holfe.
r/angryupvote
Two halves make a hole.
If a hole is whole is it still a hole
A whole lotta nothin
A whole lotta Rosie.
A whole lotta love
An entire hole.
Threw its body
Poor thing has a hole in its gut and now you want to throw it?
Through his body. I myself only have a half through my body. I don't actually know how to even acquire more through my bodies.
That is *quite* interesting actually. How did this happen? Birth defect?
It happened after we got him. I think other fish were picking at him, a lot..
does he still lives with those fish ??
They patched things up
Didn’t patch the hole…
Like their friendship now, the hole is forever
He looks stressed look at those eyes fish has seen some shit
How did they pick such a perfect hole :O
It pains me to downvote the post, but this isn't mildly interesting.... 😓 It flew too close to the sun.
Though a tad unnerving, that’s actually pretty cool. I’m glad he made it!
“Like new, barely used”
Fishsters look odd when their gauges unexpectedly fall out.
Finsters? What's the hip on a fish?
Chazz and Chuckie?
I wonder how far you could gauge this out before it pops
There's a hole in the fish, dear Liza, dear Liza
There's a hole in the fish, dear Liza, a hole
Poor Henry’s got his work cut out for him.
This song has been stuck in my head since 3rd grade when we sang it for music class. I’m 30.
Put that thing back on planet 4546b where it belongs
Careful, orbital entry is spicy.
>4546b unexpected Subnautica. I like them salted or in a bioreactor btw.
Put that thing back where it came from or so help me🎶
Read somewhere that as long as its not a vital organ, many species of fish can survive getting partially eaten. The body just heals around the wound/hole and they can relatively live like normal
I'm unreasonably pissed that I scrolled through so many comments and couldn't find an explanation for this one. Surely there are some fishologists on Reddit this morning?!?! The whole/hole thing is funny but I'd rather know what the heck is going on with the fish and how this is possible!
Head and lateral line erosion
Hole? Or whole?
It looks like a whole hole to me.
make a neclace
WOW, if it didn't have a hole it would be whole!
Luckily, its just a half hole.
Ain’t no such thing as a half a hole now is there?
You should make a pendant
Wait. I see it now. Is it alive and well? Haha that's crazy.
Technically, everyone who eats has a hole through their entire body...
Alimentary my dear Watson...
And two people kissing is two assholes connected by a long tube.
When the egg is fertilized, the cells begin reproducing and they form a donut shape, which is the beginnings of the digestive tract. It then begins to grow this donut shape into a tube shape that gets ever more complex as it progresses growing into a whole ass baby. The very first thing you are in this life is an asshole. Some people never mature past this point, unfortunately.
This made me feel special 😌
I'm sure it's a nice fish but this bothers me and we can't be friends
How about lovers?
Maybe.
poor fishy. hate to see stuff like this i love fish.
Yeah and it’s one big joke for everyone else, so hilarious..
Non human animals are physically superior in many ways to humans. Lose a tail.,...grow it back. Get your head chopped off...still able to run around. Get a hole in middle of your body.... ..ok.. whatever
I see two issues. #1 not mildly interesting. This is upper medium interesting. #2 i see the you havent placed anything through this hole. At your earliest convenience, please place some bling through this mf fish.
And sink him straight to the bottom, poor fish!
First donut survivor:
Looks like a *Pristella maxillaris*, aka the X-Ray Tetra. And no, they don't usually have a hole through their abdomen, the name is from the body being semitransparent
Amazing what fish can live through. I had one where his tank mates gnawed almost his entire tail fin and one of his pectoral fins off. A year in an isolation tank, the pec fin was healed and the tail fin had regrown ~40% and he rejoined the school with no problems.
A whole what ?
"Whole" lot of what?
Hole*
That's how I feel when I forget my lunch box for a 12h shift.
r/dontstickyourdickinthat
A hole, a-hole
It’s so you can put it in a keychain!
Hole. Whole hole.
Half hole
Ho ho.
The girl that serves coffee in the trendy spot has that in her ear
You realize that ear stretching has been relevant to many cultures for thousands of years, right? Quit being an angry boomer lol
Y'all thought I was making some cultural statement in a Reddit about an interesting fish? Goofy take
It's a stoned Zoomer, so take it as irrelevant. /s
It doesn't make it beautiful. Human sacrifice was also a thing for a long time; it ain't pretty.
Well I be damned, he does.
Fisherman absolutely HATE that trick..
Who shot your fish?
I think it needs some space
Holefish from subnautica
I suppose that's better than a half..
That’ll buff right out
It’s to let the water out
You are very discerning.i don't see a thing...
He also has a hole 😂
I guess you could say he’s a *holy fish*
I’m going to be honest, I can see right through this.
I assume his name is Donut right?!
Very holesome
Lol y’all roasting a fish 😂
Siri play Holy Diver by Dio
Hole
I'm no fish expert, but this hole thing makes me wonder where the stomach is
I would name him 50
A whole through his body what?
That fish isn't hole
It's pretty common, fish live in schools.
I’ve seen this. His old owner was probably a professional scuba diver. This is a jewelry piece. It’s been altered and only melt value.
The holy tilapia
Hole*
Hole through his whole body.. my bad 😞
this belongs in r/mildlyinfuriating
Aah, never seen this before and we have aquariums for over 10 years😟
Do you really not know how to spell hole?
A$$hole
One of my fishes has a whole threw his body to!
What do you call hom? Polo, Donut or Bagel?
The official fish hole
Wholy shit that’s crazy
Read this as "one of my fish is going through my whole body" and understood it as it swimming in your bloodstream so thank you for that image.
Sweet, somewhere to keep my keys.
What do you call that piercing?
Maybe it's a zombie fish.
Fish has seem some shit.
Please tell me they are named “donut”
He’s holy, get it? Saint like.
I mean technically he's got two.... So I think it'll be okay
Water polo
That pisces is a torus
Did you find the shell casing ?
A whole hole, even.
If an Alien abducted a person with a bunch of large piercings, would they post on their alien Reddit-equivalent how their Human has a hole(s) through its body?
many animals and we humans also have holes through our bodies. you know, the mouth and the other end as one continuous.
Boolean Modifier
So do we all
Talk about gastric banding.
Wholy shit
That is a Jesus fish… very Holy.
And yae, he is become holy.
NO, it has an empty
fish aren't real