Is Reddit Behind ChatGPT And Bard's Success? Here Is Why OpenAI, Google May Start Paying Reddit

We all remember the way OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard became a talk of the artificial intelligence (AI) town. However, what we may not remember is how these became better with repeated hits and trails. As per latest reports, Reddit may have had a role to play in ChatGPT, Bard and Microsoft’s Bing Chat success.

As per media reports, Reddit may soon start charging third parties for access to its application programming interface or API data. Several international publications have noted that due to the recent success of AI market, Reddit may have come back in the news as speculations are rife that Reddit’s API data may have been used to train some of these chatbots like Bard, ChatGPT etc. 

While it is common knowledge that many chatbots are trained with help from social media websites, Reddit reportedly has become one of the first social media platforms to charge for its data from all these companies bringing out new chatbots.

“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,” the New York Times (NYT) quoted Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman, as saying. 

The publication also mentioned that both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have been trained using Reddit’s data one way or the other. If one looks at the technicalities, it will be understood that usually, large language models are trained by downloading and processing user data from Reddit with the help of its API. 

The CEO reportedly adds, “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

As per media reports, Reddit has had a mutually beneficial relationship with Microsoft and Google. These tech giants scrape data from Reddit in order to provide accurate search results to all users. In exchange, Reddit’s position in search engine results page ranks higher and gets it more visitors. However, an official confirmation on this is awaited.