Google and Reddit will form a partnership where Google will get access to content creator’s data on the Reddit platform to train their AI models.
Social Media Platform Reddit has announced that it has made a strategic partnership with Google. Reddit has confirmed it will supply Google with content so the search engine giant can train its artificial intelligence (AI) models on that data.
The partnership of Reddit with Google is the first incident where the social media platform has agreed to supply content to an AI-building company that can utilize it to train its AI models.
Reddit also mentioned in its announcement that it is hoping that the content it will offer Google to train its AI models will be instrumental in Google improving its methods for training models.
The collaboration between the two companies would mean that the search engine giants would use Reddit’s data application programming interface (API), providing them with real-time content from Reddit’s platform.
Reddit has a large user base that interacts with the platform daily, and having real-time access to its content would mean that Google will have a diverse and extensive set of data on which to train its models. The API will also prove helpful in enabling the display of Reddit content across Google’s products.
In other words, with access to Reddit’s API and its content, Google can incorporate Reddit posts and discussions into its products and services. For example, Google might display Reddit posts in its search results or within other Google-owned platforms.
Reddit will utilize Google’s Vertex AI service, which uses artificial intelligence to improve search outcomes for companies. Reddit emphasizes that this utilization of Vertex AI keeps the rules regarding its data API the same. Reddit will still require approval for developers or companies seeking commercial access to its data.
Google’s Vertex AI is a unified platform for building, deploying, and managing machine learning (ML) models and applications.
It offers tools for data scientists and engineers to automate tasks, collaborate effectively, and deploy models to production. Vertex AI caters to various needs, from no-code training with AutoML to custom TensorFlow development.
It even supports generating creative text and images and customizing large language models. The unified platform empowers businesses to leverage AI and build intelligent applications efficiently.
The recent announcement regarding the partnership between Google and Reddit comes at the heels of another news story. Bloomberg reported that Reddit had secured a $60 million training agreement with an AI company whose identity has yet to be disclosed.
The partnership with Google was the first incident where Reddit revealed who they are partnering with, a move which came per their plan to charge companies for API use the previous year.
In 2023, Google made changes to its privacy policy, permitting the utilization of publicly accessible data for training its artificial intelligence systems. The adjustment occurred shortly after OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT, faced a class-action lawsuit in California. The lawsuit alleged that OpenAI had unlawfully gathered private user information through internet scraping.
However, Anthropic, another AI startup, took a different approach, promising to avoid using client data for training its large language models starting in 2024. These incidents highlight the ongoing debate and evolving practices in AI development regarding data privacy and ethical considerations.
Despite their collaboration, Google and Reddit have had disagreements in the past. Reddit once threatened to prevent Google from using its web crawlers on its platform due to concerns that companies would exploit its data without compensation for training AI models.
A web crawler is an automated software program that systematically browses the internet, visiting web pages and collecting information. It follows hyperlinks from one page to another, indexing the content it finds for various purposes, such as search engine indexing or data collection. It scans and catalogs web content to make it searchable and accessible.
After a lengthy buildup, Reddit filed for its initial public offering (IPO) on February 22nd to increase its valuation. The company’s value had surpassed $10 billion in 2021. The IPO filing, slated to occur in March, marks the first significant social media IPO since Pinterest’s in 2019.
In recent months, developers of AI models have been actively seeking agreements with content creators to expand their training datasets beyond relying solely on web scraping.
The need for seeking approval arose when many content creators put forward allegations that their material had been utilized without proper authorization.
The most notable incident regarding content creators not finding it lawful for AI companies to train their models on their content came in September of last year when the Author’s Guild in the U.S. filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI alleging misuse of copyrighted material in training AI models.
The suit claimed OpenAI infringed on registered copyrights by feeding written works into large language models (LLMs) without permission.
The Guild argued that this practice endangered authors’ livelihoods and suggested that OpenAI could have trained its models using public domain data or by paying licensing fees.
The Guild also stated that they have access to information that would block OpenAI’s web crawler from accessing authors’ works as they advocated for protecting their rights.
