Reddit's set to rake in $60M per year in a deal with an unnamed AI company to train future models on its 20 years' worth of user generated content

pcgamer.com:

If you've ever posted to Reddit there's a good chance you're helping train the next generation of AI models with your own words, pictures, and memes, because the company's selling access to its 20 years' worth of content for a reported $60 million. I mean, chances are you've already been used to train AIs given that Reddit's already featured pretty heavily in the training data for a bunch of different large language models (LLMs) and image generators, but at least now someone's getting paid for it.

Generative AI models, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, need to be trained on databases comprising hundreds of millions of images, books, video clips, music, and so on. Sometimes, the source is publicly available and open to use by anyone, and sometimes AI companies simply 'borrow' what's just lying around on the web. But there's seldom any money handed over between the two bodies. Not so with Reddit, as it seems that it's entered into a deal where for a healthy lump of cash each year, an AI model can use the site's content for training.

That's according to a report by Bloomberg, which says that the deal is worth $60 million per year. In the tech world, where transactions run into the billions of dollars, that might not sound like very much but it's pretty much unheard of in AI training. There's no indication as to who the other party in the deal is but it's unlikely to be a small start-up firm in somebody's back bedroom.

Reddit hosts almost 20 years of posted content on its servers, so whoever the AI firm is, it's picked up a veritable bargain. OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT, has reportedly been entering licensing agreements with multiple media companies and publishers, which doesn't seem all that different from Reddit's deal.

However, such publishers typically pay for content creators' work, or at the very least, directly employ people to make the material that OpenAI wants to use. Reddit, on the other hand, does no such thing, though the site itself is