Social news and discussion website Reddit is expanding its partnership with tech giant Google, the company said Thursday. Reddit said the deal — which gives Google access to nearly two decades of user-generated content — will make it easier “to discover and access the communities and conversations people are looking for on Reddit.”
Last week, Bloomberg reported that Reddit has signed with an unnamed AI developer in a deal worth $60 million. Today’s announcement confirms speculation that the company in question was Google.
I said yesterday that Google’s best strategy to maintain AI dominance will be to use its deep pockets to shut down sources of training data.
We have now learned that Reddit has signed a $60 million per year deal to provide its data to an unnamed AI company. The key question is whether exclusive? pic.twitter.com/U3wGynmXnS
— Dare Obasanjo
(@Carnage4Life) February 17, 2024
“Making Reddit’s content and communities easier to find helps us uphold our belief in the open internet, while better serving current users and reaching new audiences,” Reddit said. “All of this builds on our existing partnership with Google Cloud to integrate new AI-powered capabilities to improve Reddit and help achieve our mission of bringing community, connection and empowerment to everyone in the world.”
According to Reddit, Google will be able to access the library of existing content on Reddit and use the Reddit Data API to improve its products and services.
“With the Reddit Data API, Google now has efficient and structured access to newer information,” Google said in a press release. “As well as improved signals that will help us better understand Reddit content and display, train on, and otherwise interact with it in the most accurate and relevant ways.”
Google, for its part, said Reddit will in turn get access to its Vertex AI for improved search and “other capabilities.”
Launched in 2021, Vertex AI is part of Google’s suite of cloud computing services that allow developers to train and deploy custom AI applications and models.
Reddit users were mixed on the news, but mostly tended to have a negative view of the implications of Google gaining access to Reddit’s user content.
“Given the ability to filter out certain subreddits, Reddit can provide a higher quality dataset than YouTube if your goal is to tailor the AI to a particular POV,” said Reddit user u/WayOverPaid. “Some subreddits are much more heavily moderated than others.
“There’s no way Google is going to completely dump Reddit into an AI except as a first attempt to see how bad it is,” the user joked.
This comment was echoed by others who said Google would have its hands full removing problematic content from Reddit.
“So Google AI will be trained on YouTube and Reddit?” u/REOreddit asked. “Well, I certainly don’t envy the people who will have to work to make the resulting AI model non-toxic.”
The $60 million AI deal comes as Reddit is reportedly eyeing an initial public offering (IPO) in the near future. I quote people who are familiar with the matter, Reuters reported that the social media platform plans to go public sometime in March 2024 — long after it first filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021.