Reddit is a popular social networking platform where millions of people participate in discussions on a wide variety of topics every day. That’s why Reddit has valuable data that could be used by developers for a whole host of use cases, including training AI models.
Well now Reddit is now putting an end to this practice, announcing on Tuesday to start charging large companies for access to data from the Reddit API.
The social media platform has added a new “premium access point” for third-party users who require “additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights,” according to the announcement.
Google and OpenAI in the line of sight
This new level of access won’t affect everyone, as developers and researchers who want to use Reddit’s API for non-commercial purposes, like developing apps that help people use Reddit or driving university research, can always access it for free.
The real target for this new tier are large companies, such as Google and OpenAI, which have used Reddit data to train their generative AI models for free. “Reddit’s body of data is truly valuable,” Steve Huffman, Founder and CEO of Reddit, said in an interview with The New York Times. “But we don’t need to give away all that value to some of the biggest companies in the world.
Discussions that take place on the Reddit platform are extremely useful for training AI chatbots, as they help train machine learning models on what human conversations look like, which AI chatbots can then imitate in their own conversations.
Twitter recently made a similar move by introducing API access tiers. It is certainly also a response to generative AI models that use its data. Twitter owner Elon Musk has publicly spoken about issues with advanced generative AI models. But he also recently revealed that he’s working on his own AI chatbot.
Source: “ZDNet.com”