Reddit CEO says the platform is in an ‘arms race’ for AI training

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the company is in an AI “arms race.”

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the platform’s content is among the world’s best training data for artificial intelligence — and an increasingly valuable commodity as the company aims to find its place in the AI “arms race.”

Huffman discussed the future of internet search in an AI age during an appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Monday.

Amid concerns of a coming wave of “AI slop,” Huffman said Reddit, which he’s previously described as “the most human place on Earth,” will stand out even more.

“AI has to come from somewhere,” he said. “The source of artificial intelligence is actual intelligence, and that’s what you find on Reddit.”

The company, which went public in March, has become a powerful player in the AI age. The site is a wealth of “colloquial words about pretty much every topic” that is constantly being updated, Huffman said, making it extremely valuable in teaching machines how to think and speak like humans.

With its massive index of user-generated content, Reddit’s public content has already played a significant role in the creation of popular AI models, Huffman said, prompting the company to figure out its place in the AI ecosystem.

Earlier this year, Reddit created a public content policy and struck major deals with both Google and OpenAI to allow its information to be used to train the companies’ respective AI models. Google will pay Reddit $60 million a year for access to its content. The financial details of the OpenAI deal remain unclear.

“We think generally the internet is better when it’s open and interconnected,” Huffman said. “But we also need to make sure we aren’t just giving away the value of Reddit to the largest companies in the world for free.”

During the Monday discussion, Huffman was asked about whether other big-name companies are “taking advantage” of Reddit’s information without an AI deal in place.

“Yeah, the ones I didn’t mention by and large,” Huffman said, who also said Reddit was in talks with “just about everybody” to license its data when asked a specific question about Microsoft.

Reddit’s heritage is one of internet openness, Huffman said. But the company needs to find a way to maintain its values on terms that are still sustainable for the platform, he said.

“We’ve been getting scraped every which way,” Huffman said. “We’ve invested a lot in the last couple of years in locking that down, but it is an arms race.”